Ten-year-old Flavia and her friends encounter the Roman admiral Pliny before making a journey to her uncle's farm near Mt. Vesuvius, where they try to solve a riddle, reunite a family, and get out of the path of a natural disaster.
In 1542, eager to escape the French Huguenot household of her harsh father, sixteen-year-old Marguerite de la Rocque sails with her equally stern uncle, the Sieur de Roberval, to the New World, where she is left alone on an island with only her young Catholic lover and her chaperone to help her survive.
In Boston during the summer of 1773, Patience Burgess, a minister's daughter, is swept into the political tensions of the era while visiting her best friend.
In thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
In 1938, with the help of a lady doctor and an aging, card-cheating, dice-rolling horse thief, a seventeen-year-old orphan steals thirteen horses from Chickalookee, Florida's doomed rodeo, and finds a family in the process.
Taken from her home on an Aegean island as a six-year-old girl, Anaxndra calls on the protection of her goddess while she poses as two different princesses over the next six years, before ending up as a servant in the company of Helen and Paris as they make their way to Troy.
In Virginia in 1860, on the verge of the Civil War, fourteen-year-old Evvy chafes at the restrictions that her society places on both women and slaves.
