Just as sixteen-year-old Josie and her mother finally begin trusting men enough to start dating seriously, the father Josie never knew comes back to town and shakes up what was already becoming a difficult mother-daughter relationship.

Karl Shoemaker, starting his senior year in Lightsburg, Ohio, in 1973, vows to break out of the therapy group he has been forced to attend during school hours and become "normal."

Rebecca Rubin, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants living in New York in 1914, does not know what to do when her teacher assigns the class to make Christmas decorations which she is sure will upset her family, but she gets some good advice from an unexpected place.

The school lunch lady, a secret crime fighter, investigates a suspicious author after he visits the school and the gym teacher goes missing.

The school lunch lady, a secret crime fighter, sets out to stop a group of librarians bent on destroying a shipment of video game systems, while a group of students known as the Breakfast Bunch provides backup.

In 1949, thirteen-year-old Francine goes to Catholic school in Los Angeles where she becomes best friends with a girl who questions authority and is frequently punished by the nuns, causing Francine to question her own values.

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.