During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.

In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dreams of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew are disrupted when his older sister takes over the teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies."

In 1887, the social-climbing Cranstons voyage from New York to London, where they hope to find a husband for their awkward older daughter, secretly accompanied by Helena and her mouse siblings, for whom the journey is both terrifying and wondrous as they meet an array of titled humans despite their best efforts at remaining hidden.

In 1893, thirteen-year-old Rosie and members of her family travel from their farm to Chicago to visit their Aunt Euterpe and attend the World's Columbian Exposition, which, along with an encounter with Buffalo Bill and Lillian Russell, changes their lives.

Relates the surprising gifts bestowed on twelve-year-old Bob Barnhart and his family, who have recently moved to a small Illinois town in 1958, by their larger-than-life neighbor, Mrs. Dowdel.

In 1913 in the Midwest a quartet of characters share adventures from exploding steamboats to "exorcising" a ghost.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

Saga of a remarkable group of spirited women who rise to the challenges and chances of their times in the Virginia City of the Silver Bonanza amid a devastating fire, in the Marlborough Set of London in the nineties, in the San Francisco of earthquake days, and in the Europe of two world wars.

A boy continues to see a ghost of a Creole girl and he has to help her solve a riddle...otherwise he might be haunted for the rest of his life!