Growing up near Boston with her free-spirited mother and old-world grandfather, twelve-year-old Emma has always felt out of place but when she attends the family reunion her father's family holds annually in Wisconsin, she is in for some surprises.

Living with her aunt's family in Mansfield, Massachusetts, for a few months before turning eighteen and starting college, Edie is torn between Sebastian, the boy next door, and playboy Henry.-- Mansfield, Massachusetts, is the last place seventeen-year-old Edie Price wants to spend her final summer before college. It's the home of wealthy suburban mothers and prima donnas like Edie's cousins, who are determined to distract her from her mother's death...

Second-grader Hailey's frustration over a school project releases Maybelle, a sprite whose punishment for being a rulemonger will end when she grants Hailey's wish to have fun, but Maybelle's efforts only seem to cause trouble.

Her first week at a new school, shy, plain Delia befriends Amandine, not anticipating the dangerous turns their friendship would take.

Thirteen-year-old Evyn's world is turned upside-down when her father, widowed since she was a toddler, suddenly decides to remarry a woman with six children, move with Ev and her brother from Maine to Boston, and enroll her in private school.

Sally Gifford, a Patriot shoemaker's daughter, tries to maintain her close friendship with Kitty Lawton, the daughter of a Loyalist official, as pre-Revolutionary War tensions in 1773 Boston increase and push them apart.

Just before spending her sixteenth summer on Cape Cod, Sarah's boyfriend breaks up with her and, as a scientist whose focus is on winning a scholarship through her study of a comet, she designs an experiment to become more like her older sister to see if she, too, can be popular.

When twelve-year-old Rachel learns that her scoliosis has worsened and she will need to wear a back brace to keep her spine straight, she is devastated; afraid that she will not be able to play soccer, and terrified that she will not be able to hide her condition from her friends and classmates--but her mother is determined to spare her the spinal fusion surgery that she herself had as a teenager.