Graduating from their school's special education program, Quincy and Biddy are placed together in their first independent apartment and discover unexpected things they have in common in the face of past challenges and a harrowing trauma.

The summer that Hattie turns twelve, she meets the childlike uncle she never knew and becomes friends with a girl who works at the carnival that comes to Hattie's small town.

Thirteen-year-old Cynnie has had to deal with her mother's alcoholism and stream of boyfriends all her life, but when her grandparents take custody of her brother, who has Down Syndrome, Cynnie becomes self-destructive and winds up in court-mandated Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

1928. At the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, Maxine is doing everything she can to protect her younger sister Rose. Vicious attendants and bullying older girls treat them as the morons, imbeciles, and idiots the doctors have deemed them to be. Alice was left there when her brother couldn't bring himself to support a sister with a club foot. London was dragged there from the best foster situation she's ever had, thanks to one unexpected,...

After a fight at school leaves Marcus facing suspension, Marcus's mother takes him and his younger brother, who has Down syndrome, to Puerto Rico to visit relatives they do not remember or have never met, and while there Marcus starts searching for his father, who left their family ten years ago and is somewhere on the island.