Having escaped from their orphanage on a raft, Erin, January, and Mouse float down into another world of abandoned warehouses and factories, meeting a strange old man and an even stranger girl with webbed fingers and little memory of her past.

Fourteen-year-old Darcy's life undergoes a drastic change when her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974 and is unable to help Darcy deal with the teenage struggles of starting high school, falling in love, and worrying about the Vietnam War.

Thirteen-year-old Alexander Armsworth sees lights in the barn, is identified by Blossom Culp's spiritualist mother as gifted, and begins a series of Mississippi River adventures accompanied by his aged Uncle Miles and a curious female ghost.

Sixteen-year-old Mary Elizabeth's summer job at an expensive health club turns out to be more exciting than she bargained for when a series of mysterious events culminate in murder.

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

Ten stories portray life on a block in Harlem.

Roger Baxter, new and lonely in New York, does not receive much attention from his mother. He has a difficult time making friends because of a speech impediment and sometimes feels the best thing to do is disappear.

Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.