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.

The Aldens try to solve a series of mysteries which took place in a old hotel in Kansas which they visit.

Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

Twelve-year-old Henry York, finally reunited with his family, works with them and the Chestnut King, the long-deposed and mythic leader of the faeren people, to destroy Nimiane and her forces of evil.

Lu Wonder, a bright, curious girl who hopes to be a scientist, sets out from her Kansas home in 1855 with her best friend Eustace, a slave, on a journey to Antarctica to protect a mysterious artifact and hide it from the man responsible for her father's death.

When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, Pa pulls twelve-year-old May from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.