In 1952 eleven-year-old Azalea is sent to Paris Junction, Arkansas, to help out her grandmother who has injured her foot, but does not really seem to want her help; Billy Wong is a Chinese-American boy whose uncle owns the local grocery store, in town to attend the "white" school, since the Chinese mission school has closed, but frustrated by the overt prejudice of the local children--and over the summer the two begin to forge a friendship.

Thirteen-year-old Lizzie and her secret friend Noah, who's hiding in her house, plan to rescue Noah's father from the quarantined Chinatown and save everyone they love from contracting the plague that's spreading in 1900 San Francisco.

Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive? ...

"From a desperately poor village in northeast China, to a career that took him across the world, this is the incredible story of Li Cunxin -- a story that almost vanished, like so many other peasants' lives, amid revolution and chaos. At age eleven, Li was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange,...