Kathleen Karr

In 1848, fifteen-year-old Phoebe Brown disguises herself as a boy and runs away with her friend Robbie Robson to join in the California gold rush. Along the way to Sutter's Mill they encounter all sorts of mishaps, but Phoebe has survived the hardships of the Oregon Trail, and she's ready to handle any adventure that comes her way -- except maybe romance.

In 1839, twelve-year-old Matthew's job as assistant to the phrenologist Dr. Cornwall takes him up and down the Eastern Seaboard and to Europe, as they rob graves and try to find out who is following them and why.

When a disaster claims the men of their wagon train, spunky twelve-year-old Phoebe, her mother, sister, and other women rely on their own resources to complete the journey to Oregon in 1845.

During the 1920s, life for Istvan, the eldest child of a Hungarian-American family, holds both joy and sadness.

During the early 1900s, a teenaged inmate's dreary life at Massachusetts's Sherborn Prison for Women changes for the better after she becomes a member of the prison choir and participates in the production of the operetta "The Pirates of Penzance."

In West Texas in 1869, Lily and her five older sisters participate in a series of misguided schemes to save their father's ranch.

Now armed with rifles, the self-reliant women of the Petticoat Party wagon train continue their journey to Oregon City and face more challenges including a shooting contest with a band of Snake Indians.

As she went down into the inky depths Chessie's mind went wild. She could not swim... From the moment brash bargeman Erasmous (Rass) King rescued her from the murky canal waters, Catherine Ophelia Cunningham had difficulty being betoken to this self-made man. Yet, motherless at four and the sole support of her handicapped father, Chessie calls on him in one mistake after another as she takes a barge down the C&O Canal in 1850.

Kate, who lives in a lighthouse and often dreams that she is a mermaid, has a chance to rescue two real mermaids one stormy night.

In the 1840s, Dr. Asa B. Cornwall, a phrenologist, and his fourteen-year-old assistant, Matthew Morrissey, travel from Paris to Northern Africa to seek the missing skull of Alexander the Great.

While starring in a series of cliffhangers for Pathmark Studios during the summer of 1918, fifteen-year-old twins Fitz and Nelly Dalton uncover a German saboteur.

Having learned how to box while in prison, fifteen-year-old Johnny sets out to discover if he can make a decent living as a fighter in late nineteenth-century New York City.