When the toughest boy in school swears to kill him, twelve-year-old Mouse finds little help from friends and must prepare for this emergency alone.

Janetta's Grandaddy lives on a farm with chickens and a mule, and when he comes to visit her in Baltimore, Janetta is worried that he'll find the city boring.

In the summer of 1910, Dossi, a poor Russian immigrant from the tenements of New York, spends two weeks with the Meade family on their Vermont farm, and all their lives are enriched by the experience.