Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.

"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty...

"Siblings Jordan and Chung face a costly existence on their family's Kansas farm. On a conciliatory trip once again turned violent, Jordan and Chung escape the chaos of their parents' fighting to the middle of a lake. When something pulls them under, a voice speaks to them. In their long trudge back to the living, they find their chemistries altered. Jordan breathes smoke when angry. Chung flops like a fish out of water when provoked. In the years...