Ten-year-old Mary Mae, living with her parents in fossil-rich southern Ohio, tries to reconcile, despite her mother's strong disapproval, her family's Creationist beliefs with the prehistoric fossils she studies in school.
Starting a new school year, everything is "easy-peasy, simple-pimple" for Charlie until her strict teacher assigns a tough school project and Charlie's mother loses her job.
Feeling somewhat abandoned by her mother, twelve-year-old Sage is sent to spend the summer at the Maine home of her great-aunts, where she learns about and begins to identify with her family's history.
Thirteen-year-old tomboy Megan McCaffery is just beginning to enjoy growing up when her mother is diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor, turning Megan's life upside down.
Willa prepares to spend another summer on Cape Cod with her boyfriend Joey Kennelly and planning weddings, but jealousy strikes Willa's love life, her friendship with Tina goes faint, and she has to deal with an insatiable bride.
Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller, living in a world in which the Bill of Rights has been revoked, is able to keep a low profile until her mother is arrested for noncompliance and she realizes the officer responsible is her first love, Chase Jennings.
Sixteen-year-old Kat, whose mother is a home-birth midwife, feels betrayed when a popular, beautiful classmate gets pregnant and forms a bond with Kat's mother that Kat herself never had.
