Angus and Sadie, two siblings that are of mostly border collie heritage, are adopted by a young couple and start living on a Maine farm, where they begin to learn sheep herding and come to appreciate how they are different from each another.

When the state of Maine threatens to shut down their island's one-room schoolhouse because of dwindling enrollment, eleven-year-old Tess, a strong believer in luck, and her family take in a trumpet-playing foster child, to increase the school's population.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm Eleven-year-old Rebecca is leaving Sunnybrook Farm to live with her spinster aunts and become the educated daughter her family needs. Her aunts resent her father, who left behind nothing for his wife and seven children but a forty-eight-dollar mortgage. When Rebecca climbs out of the stagecoach with her pink parasol, wide-eyed and nervous about her new life, she is quickly met with the strict rules of Aunt Miranda, who has...

Married, pregnant, and living at a "fat camp" in Maine, sixteen-year-old Eleanor has many questions about her future, especially whether the marriage will last and if she should keep the baby.

Irreverent, foul-mouthed, seventeen-year-old Cricket Cherpin, living under the watchful eye of Mother Mary at a Catholic boys' home in Maine, has such bleak prospects he is considering suicide when Wynona Bidaban steps into his world.

Nine-year-old Julian almost died when he was born and he believes that he has a special connection to the universe because of that, and he wants to make his two moms and his sister (who turned into a black hole of discontentment when she turned fourteen) happy because he is convinced that soon he will die and travel to the dog star--but now they have moved to Maine and he resolves to also use his "uni-sense" ability to help Mr. X, their neighbor,...

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.