After her mother's death, Julie goes to live with Aunt Cordelia, a spinster schoolteacher, where she experiences many emotions and changes as she grows from seven to eighteen.

Unable to cope with her father's alcoholism, thirteen-year-old Sam corresponds with an older student, sharing her family problems and asking for advice.

Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.

Joey, who is still taking medication to keep him from getting too wired, goes to spend the summer with the hard-drinking father he has never known and tries to help the baseball team he coaches win the championship.

Sixteen-year-old Claire is unable to face her fears about a recurrence of her leukemia, her eating disorder, her need to fit in with the popular crowd on Hackett Island, and her mother's alcoholism until the enigmatic Lani Garver helps her get control of her life at the risk of his own.

For Georgia, this summer is shaping up to be a big disappointment. Mama is busy studying for her biology degree. Daddy is working nights, and often the man who comes home isn't Daddy: he's a man who looks like Daddy but walks a little wobbly, who sounds like Daddy but sings a little too loud. Georgia calls him the Shadow Man. So now, instead of riding horses with her friends at camp, Georgia is sent off to the country to stay with her mysterious great-aunt...

After coming out of alcohol rehabilitation, sixteen-year-old Amy sorts out conflicting emotions about her best friend Julia's death in a car accident for which she feels responsible.

A high school boy comes to terms with his drug addiction, life with an alcoholic father, and a younger brother who looks up to him.

In Florida, Anna Casey lives with what she hopes is the last in a long line of foster mothers, and Mica Delano lives with her father on their small boat, and when the two of them begin corresponding, they discover they have a lot in common.

An eleven-year-old Penacook Indian boy living on a reservation faces his father's alcololism, a controversy surrounding plans for a casino on a tribal island, and insensitivity toward Native Americans in his school and nearby town.