Dear Reader, if you have picked up this book with the hope of finding a simple and cheery tale, I'm afraid you have picked up the wrong book altogether. The story may seem cheery at first, when the Baudelaire children spend time in the company of some interesting reptiles and a giddy uncle, but don't be fooled. If you know anything at all about the unlucky Baudelaire children, you already know that even pleasant events lead down the same road to misery....

Anna Glory, the one non-singing member of a gospel-singing family, feels left out, like her misfit Uncle Newt, until the day the family bus is involved in a terrible accident.

"Life used to be great for Rose: full of friends, a loving mom, and a growing fashion blog. But when her mother dies in a car crash, Rose is sent away to live with a strange grandmother she hardly knows and forced to attend a new school where mean girls ridicule her at every turn. The one place Rose finds refuge is in her grandmother's Tudor-style greenhouse. But one night, she sees a strange light glowing from within it. She climbs a ladder to investigate......

Mathilda (Tilly), fourteen, and Ruth Anne (Roo), sixteen, are sisters and best friends in Connecticut, but when Roo crashes her car while texting she is confined to a hospital bed with "locked-in syndrome," aware of her surroundings, but apparently comatose--and Tilly must find a way to communicate with her sister, while dealing with her own sense of guilt.

After a car accident seriously injures her best friend and kills her brother's girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Anna tries to cope with her guilt and grief, while learning some truths about her family and herself.

In 1972, after his older brother is killed in a car crash, Peter Lee's mother is paralyzed by grief and his traditional Chinese father seems emotionally frozen. But Peter hopes that if he joins a Little League team in Pittsburgh he can reawaken the passion for baseball that all the members of his family used to share and bring them back to life.