Meggy Swann, a girl who walks with the aid of two sticks, arrives in Elizabethan London, along with her goose Louise, to stay with her father who really does not want her, and while he pursues his dream of transforming base metal into gold, Meggy undergoes a transformation herself.

When her father is injured, fourteen-year-old Nazia is pulled away from school, her friends, and her preparations for an arranged marriage, to help her mother clean houses in a wealthy part of Karachi, Pakistan, where she finally rebels against the destiny that is planned for her.

In the 1890s, struggling to support himself and his invalid father among the gangs on New York's Lower East Side, thirteen-year-old Sam Glodsky joins mobster Monk Eastman and his own archenemy, Izzy Fink, in a plot to rescue Eastman's prize racing pigeon from a quarantined steamship.