Gloria Whelan

During a long, snowy winter, the fourth grade boys and girls at Starvation Lake Elementary School have a contest to see who can raise the most money to help pay for a class trip.

After her mother's death, 13-year-old Clair refuses to speak and her minister father moves them from their comfortable existence to the wilds of northern Michigan to start a small mission and to begin a new life.

The community of Starvation Lake helps fourth-grader Dawn Zonder clean and repair an old house, hoping that her family will find the money to be able to move in.

When Baylor and his fourth grade class stay overnight at the Starvation Lake Ecology Center, he is nervous about what might happen, like getting lost or running into wild animals.

Left an orphan after the influenza epidemic in British East Africa in 1918, thirteen-year-old Rachel is tricked into assuming a deceased neighbor's identity to travel to England, where her only dream is to return to Africa and rebuild her parents' mission hospital.

In Leningrad in 1941, when Russia and Germany are at war, fourteen-year-old Georgi vows to help his family and his city during the terrible siege.

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 illness are being proposed, but old prejudices still hold sway.