Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

An eleven-year-old boy describes the joys and sorrows of growing up in a dysfunctional family with a jobless alcoholic father during the hard times of the Depression.

Separated from her father by the harsh conditions of the Great Depression, Natty makes a daring cross-country journey in the company of a wolf.

Ruthie Smithens tries to cheer up her best friend, Kit Kiitredge, with stories that have happy endings, but when she finds out that Kit's family is going to lose their home, she knows she must do something more to help.

During the Great Depression, Cottonmouth Tomlin, after the death of his uncle, returns home to Columbia County to the broken-down outlaw camp-the sum of his family legacy, but soon pushes the boundaries of the community's forgiving nature as he is faced with hard choices.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father-- the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

In 1936 twelve-year-old Rosie Pearl Bush and her family of migrants endure the hardships of the Great Depression as they find work picking fruit in the California Valley.

Set in the high country of Colorado during the Depression, this is the story of an unforgettable friendship between two women--eighty-six-year-old Hennie Comfort and seventeen-year-old Nit Spindle--and the deepest hardships and darkest secrets they shared with each other.