While traveling to her aunt's home in Redbud by train and stagecoach, quiet young Emily and her turtle, Rufus, team up with Jackson, fellow orphan and troublemaker extraordinaire, to outsmart mean Uncle Victor, who is after Emily's inheritance.
The feud between the Hatford brothers and the neighboring Malloy sisters continues over the summer when they reluctantly join forces to publish a newspaper.
Beth Malloy and Josh Hatford are spotted holding hands, so Josh tells his teasing brothers that he's simply spying on the girls to see what they are plotting next.
Once again the Hatford brothers and the Malloy sisters find themselves pitted against each other when embarrassing pictures of the boys turn up in the girls' basement, and the boys try to figure out how to get them back.
Eleven-year-old, motherless Alice decides she needs a gorgeous role model who does everything right; and when placed in homely Mrs. Plotkins's class she is greatly disappointed until she discovers it's what people are inside that counts.
While living with her uncle in a house haunted by the ghost of a young woman, recently orphaned Judith Sparrow wonders if her one small transgression causes mysterious happenings.
Thirteen-year-old Kenny secretly calls himself "Cricket Man" after a summer of rescuing creatures from his family's Bethesda, Maryland, pool, which gives him more self-confidence and an urge to be a hero, especially for his depressed sixteen-year-old neighbor, Jodie.
Alice fills the summer before her junior year of high school with a job at the mall, hanging out with her friends, and wishing she had a bigger family.
Sixth-grader Marty and his family try to help their rough neighbor, Judd Travers, change his mean ways, even though their West Virginia community continues to expect the worst of him.
