Fourteen-year-old Calogero Scalise and his Sicilian uncles and cousin live in small-town Louisiana in 1898, when Jim Crow laws rule and anti-immigration sentiment is strong, so despite his attempts to be polite and to follow American customs, disaster dogs his family at every turn.

As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father's death. It's1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in a...

While traveling in 1883 with her Italian-American family (including a meddlesome little sister) and other immigrant pioneers to a utopian community in Idaho, fourteen-year-old Teresa keeps a diary of her experiences along the way.

Pretending to have a much more glamorous family life, eleven-year-old Isabella worries that her new friends at a prestigious private school will discover that she is a "big fibbing, faking phony."

When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeen-year-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.

After two years in New York, Tony Petrosino speaks English and wants to stay in school, but his father insists he work full-time as a newsboy, where he battles an anti-Italian gang, sees even worse poverty than what his family experiences, and meets investigative reporter Jacob Riis.

In 1903, Maureen, originally from Ireland, comes to Boston to live with her old friend Sofia and her Italian American family, where the two girls share fifth grade class and various adventures.

Sixteen-year-old fledgling mediums Mina and Evelyn navigate their growing attraction as they investigate the connection between a vengeful spirit and murders that rocked their costal Long Island town six years ago.