Susan McAliley

Tired of doing chores and longing for adventure during the Great Depression, Kit meets a hobo and decides to hop a freight train.

Information about the foods, cooking, kitchens, and dining customs of the people who lived in northern New Mexico in 1824 and whose culture combined Spanish, Mexican, and Native American traditions.

In 1914 New York City, nine-year-old Rebecca is determined to show her family that she is old enough to light the Shabbos candles and go to the movies.

The first Christmas since Julie's parents' divorce is difficult for the whole family, but Julie finds comfort sharing the Chinese New Year traditions of her best friend, Ivy Ling, and thinking about new beginnings.

Nine-year-old Josefina, the youngest of four sisters living in New Mexico in 1824, tries to help run the household after her mother dies.

When Tia Dolores, the beloved aunt who has cared for the Montoya family since the death of their mother, announces that she is planning to leave, Josefina and her sisters try to find a way to change her mind.

In 1974 at her new San Francisco school, nine-year-old Julie does not want to tell her class about her parents' divorce, or to tell her sister about messing up her school assignment, but when she breaks her finger playing basketball and her whole family rallies around her, she realizes the importance of telling the truth.

Ten-year-old Rebecca Rubin is injured during a strike at the sweatshop where her uncle and cousin work when she tries to give a speech, while keeping a big secret from her family.

While Rebecca Rubin helps her building's ailing superintendent take care of his homing pigeons, she puzzles over what to do with the Christmas centerpiece her teacher insisted she make but which has no place in her Jewish home.

In 1974, after Julie's parents divorce, she moves to a new San Francisco neighborhood where the school does not have a girls' basketball team, so she fights for the right to play on the boys' team.