In 1918, caring for her family's homing pigeons while her father is away fighting in World War I, twelve-year-old Pam comes to suspect that a mysterious stranger in her small North Carolina town is a German spy.

At the outbreak of World War II, a twelve-year-old girl comes up with an idea to help the war effort America has just entered World War II, and everyone in Charlotte Campbell's family is doing his or her part, either abroad or in the Pennsylvania factory town where the Campbells live. Charlotte's brother Jim has enlisted in the navy, and her mother works in Braddock's local war plant. Her dad guides tugboats filled with supplies up the Monongahela...

In the early 1700s, twelve-year-old Suzette, an Ojibwa-French girl, hopes that her father will win the fur-trapping contest so that he can quit being a voyageur and stay with his family year-round, but when he is accused of stealing, Suzette must use her knowledge of both French and Ojibwa ways to find the real thief.

In 1865, while helping her family keep their Virginia farm going through the end of the Civil War, twelve-year-old Cassie meets a Confederate deserter and a Yankee prisoner of war and tries to discover who has been stealing from the farm.

In 1904, twelve-year-old Orphelia follows her dream by running away from home to join an all-black minstrel show headed for the Saint Louis World's Fair, and learns about her family's troubled past in the process.

In 1878, twelve-year-old Ida Kate and her widowed father welcome a mail-order bride and her baby to their Kansas homestead, but Ida Kate soon suspects that the bride is not the woman with whom Papa has corresponded.

In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, twelve-year-old Clara finds a baby left on the doorstep of her family's boarding house, and sets out to unravel the surrounding mysteries.

In the late nineteenth century, twelve-year-old Rhoda investigates her suspicion that a wrecker may be luring ships to their destruction on the Virginia barrier island where her father is keeper of a U.S. Lifesaving Station. Includes historical notes on the United States Life-Saving Service.