In 1851 orphans Hope and John are placed in a community of Shakers, where they encounter a way of life that is strange yet comfortable.

An orphan girl finds an unexpected home when she stops to admire the mystery and magic of the birds flocking around an old woman's house.

In the early 1930s, Karl and his sister Mary Adare, arrive by boxcar in Argus, a small off-reservation town in North Dakota. Orphaned, they look to their mother's sister Fritzie and her husband for refuge.

Heart, forced to flee in order to keep her guardian from discovering that the animals he believes to be horses are really unicorns, comes to depend on the protection of a magic silver thread given to her by Ruth.

Despite horrible conditions at the boys' home where kidnappers left him, eleven-year-old Colley, an orphan, finds a reason and a way to live, along with comradeship.

Tal Hawkins, the only survivor of the massacre of his village, is raised by the Conclave of Shadows, a mysterious order of magicians and spies, for the express purpose of avenging the slaughter of his family and friends, but he faces a soul-wrenching decision when he sets out to accomplish his mission to kill the Duke of Olasko by posing as nobleman from a distant kingdom, and is challenged to prove his allegiance to his enemy.

Philip Carey, a handicapped orphan, is brought up by a self-indulgent Victorian clergyman. Shedding his religious faith as a young man, he begins to study art in Paris, but finally returns to London to qualify as a doctor.

Twelve-year-old Kex stows away in a lifeboat, hoping to see the world, but after being washed overboard he finds himself on an island where dinosaurs and humans coexist.

Although twelve-year-old Harper has always liked Moon, an abused, orphaned older boy, their friendship is tested by a discovery Harper makes when Moon joins the Army in 1943.