A young boy grows to manhood and old age experiencing the love and generosity of a tree which gives to him without thought of return.

When Laura Ingalls and her family leave their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, they head west for the open prairie skies of Kansas Territory. They travel for many days in their covered wagon until they find the perfect spot for Pa to build them a new home. Soon they are planting and plowing, hunting wild ducks and turkeys, and gathering grass for their cows. But just when they begin to feel settled, they are caught in the middle of a dangerous...

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

"At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much. But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family...

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.

After her mother leaves home suddenly, thirteen-year-old Sal and her grandparents take a car trip retracing her mother's route and Sal recounts the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left.

Having recently discovered she is the sole heir to the throne of a tiny European principality, fourteen-year-old Manhattan resident Mia writes in her journal about her attempts to cope with this news, as well as with more typical teenage concerns.

In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past.

Halloween is the best time to catch, entertain, and make friends with a ghost.

Jessie gets ready to celebrate the New Year at his grandmother's house, except things are different this year after the fire and his grandmother having to go to the hospital, but when the New Year's bell is stolen from atop Lovell Hill, Jessie wonders how they will manage to ring in the new year without it.