Fifteen-year-old Milly Kaufman is an average American teenager until Pablo, a new student at her school, inspires her to search for her birth family in his native country.

Sixteen-year-old Kim Peterson learns more about herself and her friends, and practices her new commitment to God, by writing a teen advice column for the newspaper on which her father is managing editor.

"Inspiring, true tales of interspecies adoption, One Big Happy Family tells the heartwarming stories of animals who have reached out to save the lives of babies from other species and raise them as their own. Whether it's the border collie and his piglets, the cat and her ducklings, the orangutan and his lion cubs, or even the Labrador and her baby hippo, these are poignant, charming tales of animals who have felt the parental instinct and cared for...

"Lillian Firestone is Chinese, but the kids in her 1951 Kansas City high school can't separate her from the North Koreans that America is at war with. Sick of the racism she faces at school and frustrated that her adoptive white family just sees it as 'teasing,' Lily begins to search for her birth mother"--

Adopted by white parents and sent to an exclusive Connecticut girls' school where she is the only black student, fourteen-year-old Lahni Schuler feels like an outcast, particularly when her parents separate, but after attending a local church where she hears gospel music for the first time, she finds her voice.

During her father's presidential campaign, sixteen-year-old Sameera Righton, who was adopted from Pakistan at the age of three, struggles with campaign staffers who want to give her a more "all-American" image and create a fake weblog in her name.

When thirteen-year-old Samara devises a genetics experiment to cover up her involvement in a middle school gambling scheme, she and two classmates make a discovery that causes them to question their beliefs about God, aliens, or "Whoever-you-Are."

In the summer of 1980 before she starts junior high school in Santa Rosa, California, Tracy, who was adopted from Vietnam when she was six years old, finds an old ammo box with a dog tag and picture that bring up painful memories for both her Vietnam-veteran father and her.

Before she decides whether to accept her stepfather's proposal of adoption, twelve-year-old Adela Ram©Ưrez reaches out to her estranged biological father--who is in the midst of a career comeback as a luchador--and the eccentric extended family of wrestlers she has never met, bringing Adela closer to understanding the expansive definition of family.