The life of Henri, a quiet, sickly boy who has grown up behind abbey walls, changes forever when he is befriended by Micah, a joyful, undisciplined street urchin who joins the choir at St. Luc's in 1348, just before France is stricken by the Plague.
While eleven-year-old Hugh, his family, and his cousin Tom are spending the summer of 1943 on the South Carolina shore to escape the polio epidemic, Hugh uncovers clues that point to a German plot to sabotage a nearby naval base.
After the death of the stern aunt who raised them since they were orphaned, eleven-year-old Sallie and her fifteen-year-old sister escape their self-serving guardians and begin an adventure resembling those in the dime novels Sallie loves to read.
In Mississippi in 1955, a sixteen-year-old finds himself at odds with his grandfather over issues surrounding the kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year-old African-American from Chicago.
In 1863, a sixteen-year-old boy nicknamed Scrib travels around the West making his living writing and delivering letters, an occupation that leads to him nearly getting killed, being jailed as a criminal, joining up with the notorious Crazy James Kincaid, and delivering a letter from President Abraham Lincoln to a Paiute Indian.
When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Joe Hanada and his family face growing prejudice, eventually being torn away from their home and sent to a relocation camp in California, even as his older brother joins the U.S. Army to fight in the war.
Thirteen-year-old Nick, whose parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic, must find out why his mirror-image is causing mischief around their New England town and making sure Nick gets the blame.
In 1836, fourteen-year-old Patience Goodspeed, daughter of a ship's captain, is unexpectedly sent to a boarding school along with her brother when danger arrives at sea, and she soon suspects that her etiquette teacher is seeking out her father for a husband.
In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dreams of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew are disrupted when his older sister takes over the teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies.".
