Spider, a baby abandoned on an English farm, grows up to be mentally slower than other children but manifests a remarkable talent for communicating with animals as he comes of age during World War II.
In 1860, when their widowed mother can no longer support them, six siblings are sent on the orphan train by the Children's Aid Society of New York City to live with farm families in Missouri.
In 1837 ten-year-old Libby and her parents journey by covered wagon to the Michigan frontier, where they make themselves a new home near friendly Indians and other pioneers.
On the eve of the 1860 presidential election, as war clouds gather and the South threatens to secede, eleven-year-old Grace decides to help Abraham Lincoln get elected by writing and advising him to grow a beard.
A clumsy and unattractive twelve-year-old, Aggie is sure no one will want to adopt her when she rides the orphan train out west, but when she meets the eccentric Bradon family she begins to have some hope. Includes historical information about orphan trains and the woman's suffrage movement.
Fourteen-year-old Miriam flees to America with her family in 1910, where her family settles in a tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York and Miriam gets a job as a cuff setter at the Triangle Waist Company, but just as she is finishing work on March 25, 1911, a fire begins in the factory and she struggles to escape.
Suspecting their friend Jonathan is alive, Flavia, Nubia, and Lupus go to Rome for the Colosseum Games, facing wild beasts, criminals, conspirators, and gladiators, and where Nubia is called upon to make a terrible choice.
