Josefina hopes to become a "curandera" or healer like Tía Magdalena, and she is tested just before her tenth birthday when a friend receives a potentially fatal snakebite.

When Tía Dolores, the beloved aunt who has cared for the Montoya family since the death of their mother, announces that she is planning to leave, Josefina and her sisters try to find a way to change her mind.

Josefina and her sisters distrust learning to read and write, as well as other changes their Tía Dolores is bringing to the household, because they fear they will lose their memories of their mother.

When her father's business closes because of the Great Depression forcing Kit to make changes in her life, the nine-year-old responds with resourcefulness.

When her family moves to Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood in 1866, Addy discovers that her new home holds dangerous secrets--including one connected to the North Carolina plantation she had escaped from only two years earlier. Includes a brief overview of the experiences of African Americans during Reconstruction, the period immediately following the Civil War.

"Claudie is traveling from Harlem to Georgia with Mama and Cousin Sidney to meet her grandmother and cousins for the first time. She hopes that learning her family's story will inspire her for the variety show she's planning to raise money to save the boardinghouse her family lives in. Claudie's grandmother tells her a legend from slavery times called "The People Could Fly." In it, an old man whispers magic words, and the enslaved people grow wings...

When her father is taken prisoner by the British, Caroline Abbott, a young girl living during the War of 1812, tries to help her family run their shipyard.

When Marie-Grace discovers a baby outside her father's office and a slave catcher claims the boy, she helps place him at a white orphanage where she becomes a volunteer, as her friendship with Cécile grows and she hears rumors of yellow fever.

Now that the yellow fever epidemic is over, the people of New Orleans raise money to care for the orphans, and Cécile seeks to discover something special she can to do help.

Caroline and her mother make a dangerous trip across Lake Ontario to the British fort where her father is a prisoner. When Mama isn't allowed to see Papa, it's up to Caroline to deliver a secret message to him--right under the nose of a British guard.