Twelve-year-old Rosa and thirteen-year-old Jake form an unlikely friendship as they try to survive and understand the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

When ten-year-old Drita and her family, refugees from Kosovo, move to New York, Drita is teased about not speaking English well, but after a popular student named Maxine is forced to learn about Kosovo as a punishment for teasing Drita, the two girls soon bond.

After her San Francisco home is bombed, Calcutta native Tara Chatterjee sets out to find her roots, tracing the story of her great-great-aunt, Tara Lata, who was married to a tree in her Indian village at age five.

Sam Kinkade believes he has found his niche as a minister in rural Toms Brook, Virginia, but realizes his life is not quite complete when he meets and becomes strongly attracted to Elisa Martinez, the church sexton he hired in an effort to bridge the divide between longtime congregants and the growing Hispanic community.

After her family immigrates to America from Italy in 1903, ten-year-old Sofia is quarantined at the Ellis Island Immigration Station, where she makes a good friend but endures nightmarish conditions. Includes historical notes.

A young girl describes her feelings when her father decides to leave their home in Mexico to look for work in the United States.

Two Scottish sisters, living on the western island of Barra in the 1850s, relate, in alternate voices and linked narrative poems, their experiences after their family is forcibly evicted and separated with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton, Canada, and the other staying behind with other family on the small island of Mingulay.