Sixteen-year-old Aster, caught between a self-absorbed older sister and a mentally-disabled younger one, yearns for a normal life and, with her first boyfriend's encouragement and trust in God, she begins to make things better.

"It's 1916 when newspaper woman Anna McDowell learns her estranged father has suffered a stroke. Deciding it's time to repair bridges, Anna packs up her precocious adolescent daughter and heads for her hometown in Sunset Cove, Oregon. Although much has changed since the turn of the century, some things haven t. Anna finds the staff of her father s paper not exactly eager to welcome a woman into the editor-in-chief role, but her father insists he wants...

A Mexican-American high school senior deals with the separation and divorce of her parents and their effects on her relationship with them and with God.

Maya keeps a journal the year following her aunt's death, in which she records her thoughts about her alcoholic and drug-addicted mother and her own feelings of depression, until she decides to give her heart to God.

When sixteen-year-old Chelsea Martin's future stepmother gives her a total makeover, she attracts all of the wrong boys and drives away many girls, but her friend Janelle keeps telling Chelsea to be true to herself, while helping her find a way to catch the eye of Nicholas, the one "non-jerk" at school.