With a mother who buys Christmas cards in August and a younger brother who describes the Trinity as a toasted marshmallow on a graham cracker, life for eleven-year-old Charles Harrisong is anything but normal in Normal, Illinois.

"This is Noah Oakman, sixteen, Bowie believer, concise historian, disillusioned swimmer, son, brother, friend. Then Noah gets hypnotized. Now Noah sees changes--inexplicable scars, odd behaviors, rewritten histories--in all those around him. All except his Strange Fascinations"--

Sixth-grader Amalia learns many important life-lessons while spending Friday afternoons with her beloved grandmother, and the teaching goes on even after Abuelita's sudden death as Amalia finds a way to connect with relatives and a friend who has moved away.

Told from two viewpoints, Derek Fitzpatrick, kicked out of boarding school, must move with his stepmother to her childhood home in Illinois, where he meets Ashtyn Parker, who may be able to achieve her dream of a football scholarship with bad boy Derek's help.

En los inicios de la guerra civil estadounidense, la familia Pruitt acoge a dos misteriosas mujeres que llegan a Nueva Orleans en un barco a vapor con rumbo a Illinois. A partir de ese momento, la vida de los Pruitt cambiará completamente. 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.