When eleven-year-old Sam visits her grandfather's ranch for the first time, she finds a new life very different from the one she has known with her vagabond mother and discovers what really matters most to her.
Thirteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes aficionado Ingrid Levin-Hill tries to clear her grandfather's name when he is accused of murdering an environmental activist found dead on his farm.
Orphan Thomas Rider returns to the town of his birth at the age of eighteen to learn the truth about his parentage and how and why his mother came to destroy Ashland, Alabama's annual Watermelon Festival and accompanying fertility rite.
The stranger lurking on the Witting family's prairie farm turns out to be their long-lost grandfather, whose presence plus prodding from Caleb forces Jacob to deal with his past.
In 1948, while her mother is off making yet another movie, fourteen-year-old Allison O'Brian makes her way from New York to Oregon to see the grandfather she has never met and to learn what she can about her supposedly dead father.