Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

When nine-year-old Nellie begins to attend school, Samantha determines to help her with her schoolwork and learns a great deal herself about what it is like to be a poor child and work in a factory.

In 1945, ten-year-old Molly does not want to share her puppy Bennett with her brother but finds she might need to change her mind.

During a summer spent at Rockaway Beach in 1944, Lily's friendship with a young Hungarian refugee causes her to see the war and her own world differently.

"Olivia Brownlow is no damsel in distress. Born in a workhouse and raised as a boy among thieving London street gangs, she is as tough and cunning as they come. When she is taken in by her uncle after a caper gone wrong, her life goes from fighting and stealing on the streets to lavish dinners and soirees as a debutante in high society. But she can't seem to escape her past ... or forget the teeming slums where children just like her still scrabble...

Eleven-year-old Melody Vega and her family visit Glacier National Park every summer, but this year Mel comes face-to-face with a terrifying grizzly bear.

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape-- and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida.

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

During the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius, one boy struggles to escape. Can he survive the most devastating disaster of ancient times?