In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

A sixteen-year-old girl with a steady boyfriend suddenly begins receiving threatening phone calls while she is babysitting and anonymous notes in her high school locker.

Fifteen-year-old Todd sees his perfect suburban world start to unravel when his little sister has her mind poisoned by a member of a fundamentalist sect and he begins to notice signs of censorship in his community.

Russell Culver is 15 in the year 1904. He dreams of leaving rural Indiana to become part of a large wheat-threshing crew in the Dakotas, but he's forced to stay in school, where his sister Tansy has just become the new teacher. Through the autumn, Russell observes the strange goings-on in the classroom, including a fight for Tansy's affection between a rough-and-tumble guy named Glenn and Russell's own best friend, Charlie. Russell resigns himself...

Eighty-six poems representing viewpoints or observations on a variety of current topics.