The Gaither sisters return to Brooklyn, where they adapt to new feelings of independence while managing changes large and small, from Pa's new girlfriend to a very different Uncle Darnell's return from Vietnam.

In 1912 New York, Gertie feels left out while Mama and her four older sisters cook Hanukkah dinner, but Papa comes home and asks her help with an important task.

When her brother Rob, a Navy cook, goes missing in action during World War II, Jayna, desperate for family, leaves upstate New York and their cranky landlady, accompanied by a turtle and a ghost, to seek their grandmother, who Rob believes may live in Brooklyn. Includes soup recipes.

In 1936, three children meet at the Mercy Home for Negro Orphans in New York State, and while not all three are orphans, they are all dealing with grief and loss which together, along with the help of a sympathetic staff member and the boxing matches of Joe Louis, they manage to overcome. Includes author's notes.

Louis, who loves baseball despite being the worst stickball player in White Plains, New York, sees his opportunity to be bat boy for the 1961 Yankees team as the perfect way to escape the problems of his father's remarriage and moving to the suburbs.

When Rebecca attends summer camp in the country because of the spreading polio epidemic in New York City, she is troubled by a bully in her tent and another fellow camper who is strangely secretive.

Claudie Wells believes everyone has a talent - everyone except for her. She's growing up in New York City's Harlem neighborhood during the 1920s. Her world is filled with writers and poets, painters and sculptors, actors and dancers, singers and musicians. Claudie wants more than anything to be a person whose imagination can fly instead of a person whose feet are stuck on the ground. She tries dancing, singing, painting, and even baking, but none...

Inspired by real events in 1948, the story describes eight-year-old Stephen Satlow's life in Brooklyn, New York, and his obsession with the Dodgers baseball team. When Stephen's all-Jewish neighbors protest the arrival of an African American family to their neighborhood, Stephen decides to befriend the new neighbor who turns out to be Jackie Robinson himself. The friendship that develops teaches Stephen many lessons and binds the Christian and Jewish...

Rebecca Rubin worries that her tenth birthday will be ruined because it falls during Passover, but her mother's cousin Max, an actor, takes her with him to a movie studio, where she makes friends with an actress and a set carpenter.

In 1961, shy and overprotected eleven-year-old Shirley Alice Burns must begin speaking up if she is to do what she wants, including talking about her beloved, deceased father.