With love and determination befitting the "world's greatest family," twelve-year-old Deza Malone, her older brother Jimmie, and their parents endure tough times in Gary, Indiana, and later Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression.

When Frankie's mother died and her father left her and her siblings at an orphanage in Chicago, it was supposed to be only temporary - just long enough for him to get back on his feet and be able to provide for them once again. That's why she is not prepared for the day that he arrives for his weekend visit with a new woman on his arm and out-of-state train tickets in his pocket. Now Frankie and her sister, Toni, are abandoned alongside so many other...

During the Great Depression, aspiring reporter Kit Kittredge uncovers a mystery surrounding a secret room in the rundown mansion owned by elderly Miss Mundis.

Tired of doing chores and longing for adventure during the Great Depression, Kit meets a hobo and decides to hop a freight train.

In 1930 Abby Nichols is an eight-year-old girl growing up in Maine, but as the Depression deepens, and her mother dies, the responsibility of taking care of her family falls to her, and she has to put her dreams of going to college and becoming a writer on hold.

When the Great Depression takes almost everything they own, Ellie's family is forced to leave their home in town and start over in the untamed forests of nearby Echo Mountain. Ellie has found a welcome freedom, and a love of the natural world, in her new life on the mountain. But there is little joy, even for Ellie, as her family struggles with the aftermath of an accident that has left her father in a coma. An accident unfairly blamed on Ellie. Determined...

In 1933, when twelve-year-old Hallie Turner and her brothers, Tom and Benny, take to the road seeking whatever work they can get, they find kindness in small-town Kansas.

As they plant trees and do other environmental projects for the Civilian Conservation Corps, Russian immigrants Pavel and Anatoly are happy to find employment during the Great Depression, but when other workers accuse them of not being "real Americans," Pavel and Anatoly learn the words to the Star Spangled Banner, newly designated by Congress as the national anthem.

En 1935, cuando su madre consigue un trabajo de limpieza para una mujer a la que no le gustan los niños, Turtle, de once años, es enviada a quedarse con parientes que nunca conoció en el lejano Key West, Florida. In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida.