Like the other kids, Pearl goes to school, plays in the woods, and does her chores. But Mama is gone, and doesn't seem to have a thought for the family she's left behind. Escaping from her worries is part of Pearl's routine, like losing herself in books. Until she discovers swing dancing. The music transports Pearl to a whole other world. Then Mama unexpectedly returns, and it isn't the happy occasion she had imagined.

When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeen-year-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.

It is 1969, and Jimmy Koprowski returns from the air force to Raysburg. He is drifting along until his sister starts an all-girl clainet band, and he falls for the band's star player.

In the months leading up to the August 1991 coup attempt that resulted in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, a young dancer with the Kirov Ballet struggles to decide whether to defect while on an upcoming trip to Paris.

Abandoned by her father during the Depression, eleven-year-old Elsie lives in the garage behind her old house with her mother, grandmother Nan and out-of-work uncle. Elsie's friend Scoop accompanies her as she searches for her father in the city, encountering unfriendly hobos, food lines and shantytowns. After both her uncle and her mother disappear on mysterious errands, Elsie and Scoop eventually discover them competing in a dance marathon. Persuading...

In Five Points, New York, in the 1840s, African American teenager William Henry "Juba" Lane works hard to achieve his dream of becoming a professional dancer but his real break comes when he is invited to perform in England. Based on the life of Master Juba; includes historical note.