Ten-year-old Caitlin, who has Asperger's Syndrome, struggles to understand emotions, show empathy, and make friends at school, while at home she seeks closure by working on a project with her father.

As Esme introduces her stuffed animal collection that is alphabetically arranged from Alvin the aardvark to Zelda the zebra she also relates her family's military life and her father's deployment.

Sixth-grader Jules is used to moving into old houses. Her dad, who specializes in historical renovation, restores them to their former glory. This time, she's worried their new old house, a crumbling Virginia mansion, is haunted. Though she is staying in a modern addition, she has visions of the past from the point of view of a girl named Lily. Nightly, Jules hears a ghostly reenactment of angry men storming the home and Lily barricading herself in...

In 1955, Woodrow and his cousin Gypsy befriend a new girl in their seventh grade class in rural Virginia, and the three of them set off to find Woodrow's missing mother, encountering unlikely and intriguing coincidences along the way.

After her father leaves the family farm on Lost Mountain to be General Lee's guide, Addie finds ways to remember him--even when he does not return at the end of the war.

Twelve-year-old Treasure Daniels and her younger sister must move in with Great-aunt Grace until their mother sorts herself out, but life in Black Lake, Virginia, where segregation lingers, is hard and Grace is a nightmare--at least on the surface.

When twelve-year-old Frederick "Red" Porter's father dies in 1972, his mother wants to sell their automobile repair shop and move her two sons back to Ohio, but Red is desperate to stop the sale even if it means unearthing some dark family secrets in a Virginia rife with racial tensions.

With their father away most of the time advocating independence for the American colonies, the children of Patrick Henry try to raise themselves, manage the family plantation, and care for their mentally ill mother.

In Hadley, Virginia, twelve-year-old Dawnie Rae Johnson, a tomboy who excels at baseball and at her studies, becomes the first African American student to attend the all-white Prettyman Coburn school, turning her world upside down. Includes historical notes about the period.