On Career Day, a young girl entertains the class with a description of her father's exciting job as light bulb changer at the top of the Empire State Building.
When her absent-minded inventor father suddenly remembers that he has five sisters, nine-year-old Harriet Bean, who has never heard of them before, determines to find her unknown aunts so that the unfinished family portrait can be completed.
Mary Anne's father never talks about her mom, who died when she was a baby, so she goes up to the attic and looks for anything she can find that will tell her more about her mother.
Suzy spends her year in first grade waiting for her father, who is serving in Vietnam, and when the postcards stop coming, she worries that he will never make it home.
Zita, rejected by her father and raised as a kitchen maid, learns when she is nearly 12 that she is a princess and she tries to save her twelve sisters from an evil enchantment.
When her father disappears and animals go silent, Sylvie and her friend George try to find him and end up in the world of the Songman, where nothing can sing or speak.
