Seven-year-old Ramona Quimby, feeling that she is perhaps not as loved as her younger sister, tries a number of ploys to get her mother's attention.

In Canton, Texas, seventeen-year-old Mercy's dreams of a different life than her mother's are postponed by harsh circumstances, including the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which forces her into doing domestic work for a loving, if troubled, family.

Harassed at her middle school, not taken seriously at home, and with a "perfect" older brother, Matthew, to live up to, thirteen-year-old Claire has always felt like her life was cursed-- then one morning, when she are her beloved father are talking at breakfast, her father suddenly falls over with a stroke, and suddenly everything changes.