After their mother abandons them during the Great Depression, eleven-year-old Tennyson Fontaine and her little sister Hattie are sent to live with their eccentric Aunt Henrietta in a decaying plantation house outside of New Orleans.
The mothers of four very different sixth-grade girls pressure them into forming a book club, and find, as they read the classic novel "Little Women," that they have more in common than they thought.
Lyrical text accompanied by vivid illustrations explains to an adopted daughter how the love of her anonymous birth mother and the woman raising her combine to shape who she is.
Each year on the birthday of her adopted Chinese daughter, a mother recalls the moments they have shared, from the first toy to the friends left behind in China.
In "conversations" with her dead mother, fifth-grader Livvy records her adjustment to living in Baltimore with a woman she had never met, and she comes to see the wisdom of her mother's choice as she gets to know the woman's large, loving family.
A thirteen-year-old girl gains a much more sympathetic understanding of her relationship with her mother when she has to spend a day in her mother's body.
Ella tries to give her handicapped daughter Lena a normal life, but when she discovers that Lena has a mind of her own, Ella must contend with letting her daughter go.
