One month after their parents' disappearance, the third-grade Huit octuplets deal with a malfunctioning refrigerator and try to win the love of the only boy in their class at Valentine's Day, while Dorinda discovers her special power and gift.

On New Year's Eve, the octuplets Huit--Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Jackie, Marcia, Petal, Rebecca, and Zinnia--discover that their parents are missing, and then uncover a mysterious note instructing them that each must find her power and her gift if they want to know what happened to their parents.

The Huit octuplets discover Marcia's special power--the ability to see through things--which helps when their evil neighbor calls Social Services to report that they are living alone because their parents have not returned from wherever they disappeared to.

The Huit octuplets, each of whom has now discovered her power and received her gift, finally learn where their parents are, but before they can attempt a rescue they must face the Other Eights and a very scary aunt.

"A young girl fights to keep her mama out of the mental ward, her home away from the bank, and herself out of the orphanage after her father abandons her and her mother in depression era Alabama"--

As she struggles to recover and survive, seventeen-year-old homeless Charlotte "Charlie" Davis cuts herself to dull the pain of abandonment and abuse.

In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility--much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don't include marriage to the poor French boy the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents send the baby Elodie to an orphanage where she receives horrible treatment. Seventeen years later,...

Having reached the mature age of eleven in the tiny California town of Hard Pan (population 43), Lucky discovers that there is still much to learn about friendship, parental trust, and the Milky Way galaxy.

Rita and Rosie Stevens are only nine and five years old when their widowed mother marries a violent bully called Jimmy Randall. Under pressure from him, she is persuaded to send the girls to an orphanage - not knowing that the papers she has signed will entitle the charity running it to do what they like with them. And it is not long before the powers that be decide to send a consignment of orphans to their sister institution in Australia. Among them...