Gloria Whelan

In 1907, sixteen-year-old Julia Hamilton, happy to accompany her diplomat father on a tour of the Ottoman-controlled cities of Istambul, Damascus, Palmyra, and Aleppo, soon finds the journey increasingly hazardous as she begins to uncover her father's true mission and the secret motivations of the other travelers in their group.

In order to save her baby sister, fourteen-year-old Chu Ju leaves her rural home in modern China and earns food and shelter by working on a sampan, tending silk worms, and planting rice seedlings, while wondering if she will ever see her family again.

In 1913 Russia, twelve-year-old Katya eagerly anticipates leaving her St. Petersburg home, though not her older cousin Misha, to join her mother, a lady in waiting in the household of Tsar Nicholas II, but the ensuing years bring world war, revolution, and undreamed of changes to her life.

In 1840, Libby, living with her family on the Michigan frontier, finds herself inadvertently caught up in the forced evacuation of a group of Potawatomi Indians from their tribal lands.

In 1841 thirteen-year-old Libby and her family begin a new life on the shores of Lake Michigan where her father works as a surveyor for the Ottawa Indians and Libby is reunited with her Indian friend Fawn.

Hannah, a blind girl living in Michigan in the late nineteenth century, doesn't go to school until a new teacher tells her about the Braille method of reading for the blind.

In 1919, independent-minded fifteen-year-old Rosalind lives in India with her English parents, and when they fear she has fallen in with some rebellious types who believe in Indian self-government, she is sent "home" to London, where she has never been before and where her older brother died, to stay with her two aunts.

Yatandou, a young Mali girl, helps the women of her village pound millet kernels to raise enough money to buy a machine that will do the work for them.

After their mother dies of typhoid, Verna and her younger sister Carlie move with their father, a psychiatrist, and stern Aunt Maude to an asylum for the mentally ill in early-twentieth-century Michigan, where new ideas in the treatment of mental illnessare being proposed, but old prejudices still hold sway.