Fourteen-year-old Mike, whose father is a brilliant mathematician but who has no math aptitude himself, spends the summer in rural Pennsylvania with his elderly and eccentric relatives Moo and Poppy, helping the townspeople raise money to adopt a Romanian orphan.

In England in 1346 Adrian has three problems: he is small for his twelve years, he is an albino, so people are suspicious of him, and his father wants him to be a scribe, while he wants to be an archer--but when he runs away to join his friend in the fight against the invading Scots, he learns that war can be a lot more complicated then he imagined.

Shy, eleven-year-old Lily made her dad an important promise before he passed away--that she would "Strive for Five" and speak her mind at least five times. But speaking up one time, let alone five, is easier said than done. It'll be even harder now that Lily must attend public school for the first time. Fortunately, she meets curling-obsessed Hobart and quiet Dunya at the beginning of sixth grade. Their kindness gives Lily hope that life without Dad...

"Shows young readers how the whole world is a community made up of people who are more similar than we are different"--

In a Pennsylvania town where anti-war sentiments are treated with contempt and violence, Matt, a fourteen-year-old girl living with a Quaker family, deals with the demons of her past as she battles bullies of the present, eventually learning to trust in others as well as herself.