In 1945, thirteen-year-old Levi is sent to find the father he has not seen in three years, going from Chicago, to segregated North Carolina, and finally to Pendleton, Oregon, where he learns that his father's unit, the all-Black 555th paratrooper battalion, will never see combat but finally has a mission. Includes historical notes.

After his father's death, seventh-grader Sam West is whisked from Louisiana to Oklahoma, where he discovers a mysterious tree trunk that leads to a world where Pa is still alive.

Finn and his friends travel to the Subatomic, a microscopic world where Finn hopes to find his father and defeat the Plague once and for all.

The way twelve-year-old Ked Eakins of Norton, Maine, sees it his life has been stolen from him, piece by piece; first by kyphosis, a spinal abnormality which has made him a social outcast at school and a target for the school bully, by his friends who have recently abandoned him, by his mother who left for the West Coast taking the insurance which might have saved him with her, and by his father who is a gambling addict who has lost the rent money--but...