Thirteen-year-old Irene helps in her grandfather's plant nursery, makes new friends, and begins to learn what she really wants and needs after her father, having lost his job as an investment banker, moves her and her mother to his father's farmhouse upstate.

Eve gave up her belief in stories and magic after her mother's death, but a mysterious seed given her as an eleventh-birthday gift by someone she has never met takes her and a boy who claims to be a ghost on a strange journey, to where their supposedly cursed town of Beaumont, New York, flourishes.

Ten-year-old Sprig no longer gets along with her twelve-year-old sister, Dakota, but the two pull together during their father's extended business trip to Afghanistan, sharing concerns about his safety, an elderly neighbor's health, fights with their best friends, and boys.

In 1963, when her flamboyant mother abandons the family to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, eleven-year-old Ellie Dingman takes charge of her younger siblings, while also trying to deal with her outcast status in school and frightening acts of prejudice toward the "misfits" that live on her street.

When Max and his sister Rose go to visit their grandmother's lakeside vacation home, they soon discover that their nightly sleeps bring them to a timelocked place with kids from all different eras, united by their love of the lake--and Max begins to wonder if they can help him to find his missing mother.

Teenager Eliza and her friends are going to explore a cave near their upstate New York home, but first her friends insist on dragging her to Drowner's Swamp, a bog legendary for its dangerous sinkholes, and a place which her mother has frequently warned her about; Eliza does not want to go, and when the earth opens up and swallows her she finds herself in a system of caves--and what she finds living there is strange and dangerous beyond anything the...