Trying to hold onto the newfound stability of his life in a foster home, thirteen-year-old David worries about the growing moodiness of his guardian Paul and the fluctuating fortunes of his Pony League baseball team.
In 1856, having traveled with his young sister from New York to a foster home on a farm in Missouri, ten-year-old Danny plots to get his foster father to send for and marry his mother.
Eleven-year-old Michael Patrick Kelly from New York City is sent to a foster home, a Missouri farm with a sadistic owner, a bullying son, and a number of secrets, one of which may be murder.
When their mother has to go into the hospital, two brothers are sent to a church home, where Tommy not only feels responsible for his younger brother but also is drawn to a boy who is dying of tuberculosis.
Fourteen-year-old Stephen, his new foster brother, and his friends are sentenced to help out at an old age home for the summer after Stephen is caught writing graffiti on a train.
While trying to deal with her new life with a stepfather and a younger foster sister, Sarah encounters a strange boy who claims to have traveled forward in time from the nineteenth century.
A troubled twelve-year-old with a history of running away from foster homes is given a last chance when he is sent to a farm where other "tough kids," who can make or break each other, are looked after by a caring Englishman.
Sent to spend the summer in the country, three foster children and an older woman recovering from a serious accident are abandoned by their slovenly caretaker and must try to survive on their own.
When her father dies, ten-year-old Rebecca is sent to live with the mother she's been brought up to believe had abandoned her and, through a growing relationship with a troubled foster child, begins to accept her mother and some of the truths her father had always kept from her.
