In early 1940s Poland, ten-year-old Felix and his friend Zelda escape from a cattle car headed to the Nazi death camps and struggle to survive, first on their own and then with Genia, a farmer with her own reasons for hating Germans.
The lives of Marie-Laure, a blind girl living in Saint-Malo, and Werner, a orphan training at an elite Nazi school, intertwine during the Nazi occupation of France.
When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.
Impoverished Vermont farm girl Lyddie Worthen is determined to gain her independence by becoming a factory worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1840s.
Ten-year-old Chet Roscow is beginning to feel at home staying in Elm Hills, New Jersey, with his Uncle Jerry while his parents are away on business. Then Chet hears news about a great white shark attacking swimmers along the Jersey shore. Chet thinks he's safe in Matawan Creek but then he has a close encounter with the shark.
When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, twelve-year-old May's father pulls her from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.
A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.
When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.
When Jack and Annie travel back to the Kansas prairie in search of "something to learn," they gain an understanding of how hard life was for pioneers and they experience the terror of a tornado.
