In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

Tough times in rural Georgia during the Depression take a lively turn when spirited Ida Early arrives to keep house for the Suttons.

"Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the FWP to write the first official account of Macedonian History. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture...

During the Depression, Gunther Grunt buys a new car with the money his wife has been saving to send their bright twelve-year-old daughter to college, beginning a chain of events that teaches the Grunts the value of their family.

When Arlen Wagner awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death's telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but are soon stranded at the Cypress House--an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady--directly in the path of an approaching hurricane. But...

"In 1937 Montana, fourteen-year-old Houston "Huck" Finn finds a dead body in a local creek and steals the man's rare Lindbergh flight watch. Huck is an aspiring aviator, working to build his own airplane-a secret he has kept from his God-fearing mother. His cousin, Annelise, arrives from Los Angeles for a long stay with his family, and Huck is initially wary until he learns she has had flight lessons. As his airplane takes shape, and the young cousins...

The Kamp siblings expect a Christmas without presents. When their father scrapes together a dollar in coins to use for Christmas gifts, everything begins to change. Just when Norman and Ruthie believe their hopes and dreams are dashed, small miracles teach the true meaning of Christmas giving.

During the Depression era of the 1930s Maggie grows up in logging camps and small towns of Oregon while living in the midst of a troubled family with an abusive father.