Robin Perry, from Harlem, is sent to Iraq in 2003 as a member of the Civilian Affairs Battalion, and his time there profoundly changes him.

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

Sixteen-year-old Jimmy, on probation for assault, talks about life with three old men in a Harlem barbershop and hears about the tools he can use to get what he wants.

Seeing no way out of his difficult life in Harlem, seventeen-year-old Jeremy "Lil J" Dance flees into a house after a drug deal goes awry and meets a strange man who reveals different turning points in Lil J's life when he could have made better choices.

Fifteen interrelated stories explore different aspects of love, including a dying father's determination to help start a family business--a beauty salon--and the relationship of two teens who plan to remain celibate until they marry.

During a summer in Harlem, David relies on his mother and a close friend and on an old man he meets in the park to help him come to terms with his father's outbursts and unstable behavior.

In 1863, fifteen-year-old Claire, the daughter of an Irish mother and an African father, faces ugly truths and great danger when Irish immigrants, enraged by the Civil War and a federal draft, lash out against African-Americans and wealthy "swells" of New York City.