Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill.

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.

Kimi Nakamura loves fashion, and designing clothes, jewelry, and accessories for her friends, but her mother, a professional graphic designer with a long list of clients, wants her to be a serious artist, and is furious when she discovers Kimi has dropped her fine arts class; so Kimi is relieved to be able to visit her normally estranged grandparents in Kyoto during spring break--but what begins as an escape becomes a way to learn about her mother...

Keiko, Audrey, and Jenna have always been best friends, and Keiko desperately wants it to stay that way, but now they are starting seventh grade, and everything seems to be changing; Audrey is obsessed with the idea of them all securing boyfriends, but when she and Jenna focus on the same boy their friendship starts to break apart--and then Keiko finds herself attracted to Audrey's brother, Conner (who has generally been cast as the enemy), and suddenly...

When boyfriend Elliott breaks up with Jenna Sakai before Christmas break, she just about convinces herself that relationships are for suckers and she is better off without them; but unfortunately she finds herself in competition with Elliott for a journalism scholarship, and worse, her first assignment for the newspaper club is to write a personal essay, which is difficult when you are someone who prefers to keep your emotions bottled up--and then...

Sixteen-year-old reality TV star Dakota grapples with the fact that her entire life is public fodder while at the same time she is wrestling with her feelings for her best friend Leo, who is dealing with his own issues at home. Dakota McDonald swore she'd never allow her romantic life to be a plot line in her parents' HGTV show again. When the restaurant run by the family of her best friend (and secret crush), Leo, is on the line, Dakota might end...