After participating in a cruel prank on a classmate, fourteen-year-old Robin and her mother move to Oklahoma, where Robin is mistaken for the substitute principal and receives a new perspective on bullying.
In an Oklahoma oil drilling camp in 1960, fifteen-year-old Clare finds her relationship with her best friend threatened by her new romance with Ethan, a boy carrying a dark secret.
In alternating passages, a young White House seamstress named Bella and the actor John Wilkes Booth describe the events that lead to the latter's assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Always overshadowed by his competitive older brother, especially in their work as mule drivers on the Erie Canal, fourteen-year-old Howard finally finds the courage to pursue his dreams of becoming an educator after he learns about sign language and teaches it to his deaf friend in nineteenth-century New York State.
Long ago in Nowhere, Texas, Mama and Papa Upagainstit agree to take in the wild baby their five children find in a passing tumbleweed, despite the objections of the one who used to be "the littlest-of-all girl.".
