A suggestion from her mother leads Sophie to befriend the new girl at school and an elderly, grouchy woman, and helps her overcome the feeling that she is not good at anything.

As a slag heap, the result of strip mining, creeps closer to his house in the Ohio hills, fifteen-year-old M. C. is torn between trying to get his family away and fighting for the home they love.

Fox Street means everything to Mo Wren, who is nearly eleven, and so she is very upset when a land developer offers to buy her father's house, especially since she has not yet found the fox she is sure lives in the nearby ravine.

Rising high school senior Maggie remembers little about the accidental death of her boyfriend, Joey. But as she slowly begins to recall that day at the gorge with their long-time friends, she realizes he was keeping some terrible secrets.

A black family of five moves into an enormous house once used as a hiding place for runaway slaves. Mysterious sounds and events as well as the discovery of secret passageways make the family believe they are in grave danger.

Everything seems to be going well for fifteen-year-old Annie, between her popular blog, good friends, and cheerleading, but when her cousin Shawna returns from Paris and becomes the center of attention, Annie cannot help but be jealous.

Ten-year-old Mary Mae, living with her parents in fossil-rich southern Ohio, tries to reconcile, despite her mother's strong disapproval, her family's Creationist beliefs with the prehistoric fossils she studies in school.

Times are tough in the small town of Cliffs Donnelly, Ohio (sarcastically called If Only) especially for some of the kids at Rod Serling Middle School, but then an old dry well suddenly begins to grant wishes, or so it seems--three of the students, Ernest Wilmette, Ryan Hardy, and Lizzy MacComber, know what is happening (but do they really?), because sometimes a good deed can make magic happen.