Raised by his grandparents, first in Mississippi then in Wisconsin, ten-year-old Lymon moves to Chicago in 1945 to live with the mother he never knew, while yearning for his father.

Although 13-year-old Willa Jo and her Aunt Patty seem to be constantly at odds, staying with her and Uncle Hob helps Willa Jo and her younger sister come to terms with the death of their family's baby.

Two women of a friendship trio are shattered when their third companion accidentally drowns, and in the aftermath, they realize that their loss extends beyond grief as their layers of secrets and connections are gradually revealed.

In 1919, independent-minded fifteen-year-old Rosalind lives in India with her English parents, and when they fear she has fallen in with some rebellious types who believe in Indian self-government, she is sent "home" to London, where she has never been before and where her older brother died, to stay with her two aunts.

After Grandma dies the annual visit to her summer cabin is not the same but the cat next door remembers how things used to be and cheers a grieving grandchild.

After the death of the beloved aunt who has raised her, twelve-year-old Summer and her uncle Ob leave their West Virginia trailer in search of the strength to go on living.

Marianne Neumann takes a job as a placing agent with the Children's Aid Society in hopes of finding her younger sister. In 1858 New York she finds it's not always easy to offer children a better life. Former schoolteacher Andrew Brady suffers from a grief that won't go away--and keeps hidden a secret from his past. As the two team up to place orphans across Illinois, a shocking tragedy threatens their work--and changes one of their lives forever.

Eighteen-year-old Finley, seeking God, quiet time to prepare for an audition at a prestigious music conservatory, and knowledge of the land her deceased brother loved, spends senior year in Ireland, where teen movie idol Beckett Rush, equally troubled, desires her company.

Neglected by her father who spends all of his time building a ghost machine to bring her mother back from the dead, twelve-year-old Emmaline decides that the only way to bring her father back will be to make the machine work, or destroy it forever.