Twelve-year-old Jess O'Fines is resentful that she is expected to watch her baby niece in a Los Angeles hotel room while the rest of her dysfunctional family go off to a wedding rehearsal party -- but when Baby Ruby disappears, Jess is convinced she knows who kidnapped her and determined to get her back on her own, whatever the danger.

Eleven-year-old Joshua, worried about fitting in at school, feels awkward when the new student he is supposed to be helping becomes the target of the fifth grade's biggest bully.

It is 1973 and Watergate is on everyone's lips. Lucy Painter is a children's book illustrator and a single mother of two. She leaves New York and the married father of her children to live in a tightly knit Washington neighborhood in the house where she grew up and where she discovered her father's suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets : her children know nothing of her father's death or the identity of their own father....

Confused by all of the males in her life, thirteen-year-old Alyssa "Blister" Reed wants to help when her best friend Jonah's quest for popularity lands him in deep trouble, but his desire to make her his girlfriend gets in the way.

In 1950s Ohio, ninth-grader Franny feels isolated and self-conscious at high school because of her deformed leg and feet, but her irrepressibly high-spirited mother is determined to find shoes for Franny to wear at the school dances.

Ben's troubles at school get progressively worse when he starts hanging around Trout, a new boy in his fifth grade class, who is also labeled as learning disabled.