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After ten years in a refugee camp in Thailand, thirteen-year-old Mai Yang travels to Providence, Rhode Island, where her Americanized cousins introduce her to pizza, shopping, and beer, while her grandmother and new friends keep her connected to her Hmong heritage.

Seven stories, spanning the time period from 1948 to 2000, chronicle the experiences of young people from different races and ethnic groups as they try to cope with the restrictions placed on their lives by South Africa's apartheid laws.

An account of World War II in Germany as told from the viewpoints of a former Nazi soldier and a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

When eleven-year old Shabanu, the daughter of a nomad in the Cholistan Desert of present-day Pakistan, is pledged in marriage to an older man whose money will bring prestige to the family, she must either accept the decision, as is the custom, or risk the consequences of defying her father's wishes.

Rob becomes obsessed with searching the airwaves for his long-gone father, a radio announcer.

Emily is sent to a camp for underachievers where she discovers a murderer on the staff who might provide an explanation for her recurring nightmares.

In 1944, when the Americans liberate Bikini Atoll from the Japanese, fourteen-year-old Sorry Rinamu does not realize that in two years he will lead a desperate effort to save his island home from a much more deadly threat.

Orphan Meg Finn's soul becomes the object of a battle between the demonic and the divine after she is killed in an accidental explosion while attempting to rob an elderly manand arrives in the afterlife to find the tally on her good and evil deeds is dead even.

Merlin's fragile home on the isle of Fincayra is threatened by the attack of a mysterious warrior with swords for arms and by the escape of Stangmar from his imprisonment, as Merlin continues to move toward his ultimate destiny.

The author tells the story of her painful childhood in China where she lived until the age of fourteen with her father, stepmother, and siblings, all of whom considered her bad luck because her mother died shortly after giving birth to her.