With the support of her two best friends, sixteen-year-old Kathleen tries to balance her summer volunteer work at the hospital with her responsibilities caring for her mother, who has multiple sclerosis, and her attraction to a handsome boy.
The start of a new school year holds many challenges as Rory becomes interested in joining Chilton's Puff sorority, and her mother tries to get more involved with the school.
Rory, encouraged by her mother to wallow in self-pity after her boyfriend Dean breaks up with her, decides to handle the situation in a very different manner.
Greer spends the summer of 1924 at a Long Island seashore mansion, where she helps her psychic mother and a sinister magician conduct seances, and unexpectedly finds new direction for her life.
After eleven-year-old Ashley receives the goldstone pendant from her Aunt Jo, she finds she can not only see the future, but that she also now has a stalker, a ghostly presence from the past who is determined to reclaim the stone at whatever the cost.
Unsatisfied with her mother's frequent absences from home and seeking love and security, Tibby believes she has found solace with members of a rigid fundamentalist sect, until a crisis forces her to make a difficult choice.
Kim faces many changes her senior year in high school, including Nat's hasty wedding, childbirth, and ultimate decision about the baby, the first holidays without her mother, new problems for cousin Maya, and a significant surprise from her past.
Emily Anderson, a college freshman raised by her grandparents, discovers the love story of the young parents she never knew, sets out to find them, and brings them together, a fighter pilot and a war correspondent whose love for each other remains but is made complicated by their opposing religious and political views in the midst of the Iraq War.
