"Itzel's 13th birthday party starts in just about the unluckiest way possible - with her dad having a heart attack. In those frantic moments, the piñata and the frosted sheetcake and the Styrofoam cups of orange soda are forgotten; the day's highlights end up being CPR, an ambulance ride, and angioplasty. But when her father gets home from the hospital, his problem's are far from over - and Itzel's are just getting started" -- Back cover.

"Penny has never met anyone smarter than her. That's par for the course when you're a savant--one of less than one hundred in the world. But despite her photographic memory and super-powered intellect, there's one question Penny doesn't know the answer to: where did her father go when he left her and her mother years ago? On Penny's 21st birthday, she receives a card in the mail from her father, just as she has every year since he left. But this birthday...

"Minnow Hunter has always tried to lead the life her single father, Christopher, modeled - private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when a split-second decision makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. She even loses the support of her father, who stops speaking to her when the media start harassing him too. Overwhelmed, Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris, hoping distance and...

"Welcome to Stanhope. A safe neighborhood. A place for families. On the surface, William Wooler is a family man. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery's family declares her missing. Suddenly Stanhope doesn't...

"After her parents split up, seven-year-old Lisa's father convinces her to leave out the window in the middle of the night. After all, according to their religion, she belongs to him, and it is her duty to obey him. Ever the dutiful daughter, at least on the outside, and confused about the sinful changes in her mother (she's cut her hair, there's a new man around, she's had a baby with him), Lisa complies. She spends the next nine years on the run...

"Tacoma Jones loves working at her family's roadside diner, the Brake Fast, pouring coffee and serving eggs and muffins to truckers all day long. But tonight, she is finally going to break out her collection of cookbooks and prepare the best dinner the state of Washington has ever seen. But her excitement is dampened when she learns that today is one of Dad's bad days, when his depression makes it hard for him to get out of bed. Tacoma knows she can't...

"Josef Haupt, once a staunch opponent of Hitler, now finds himself as a local Reich official, enabling the horror he once fought against. As the Jewish community is sent to their deaths and his sons are drafted to fight in the war, the evil of his choices ricochets against his family. His eldest daughter, Margarete, watches as her once-peaceful town becomes an authoritarian outpost. She comes of age amidst the chaos of war while also fighting to keep...