Kirsten and her family celebrate their first Christmas in their new home on Uncle Olav's farm in mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota.

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.

Kaya is overjoyed that her sister, Speaking Rain, has returned; however, she is still saddened that she will never see her beloved horse, Steps High.

Laura and Almanzo Wilder and their eight-year-old daughter Rose continue to work to make Rocky Ridge farm in Missouri their new home.

The adventures of eleven-year-old Adam as he travels the open roads of thirteenth-century England searching for his missing father, a minstrel, and his stolen red spaniel, Nick.

In the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, ten-year-old Sasha idolizes his father, a devoted Communist, but when police take his father away and leave Sasha homeless, he is forced to examine his own perceptions, values, and beliefs.

Ben is visiting his dad's home town in Japan when first a massive earthquake, and then a tsunami hit the island nation. Now Ben is alone, separated from his family, and stranded in a strange country. Can he survive this epic disaster?

"It was 1964 in the brand-new state of Alaska, a vast land of staggering beauty and heart-stopping dangers. Eleven-year-old Jack had grown up living happily with his parents in an off-the-grid cabin, miles from their closest neighbors. Grizzlies and wolves outnumbered people, and dark winter days were 30 degrees below zero. Jack had always thought of himself as strong--"Alaska tough". But then the most powerful earthquake in American history--the...

Twelve-year-old Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived slave offers to teach her how to read. Sarny, a female slave at the Waller plantation, first sees Nightjohn when he is brought there with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars. He had escaped north to freedom, but he came back--came back to teach reading. Knowing that the penalty for reading is dismemberment Nightjohn still retumed to slavery...

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.