In a small, Virginia town, sixth-grader Jessie Lou Ferguson has a crush on the hugely popular Conrad Parker Smith, and when he suddenly develops a medical problem and the teacher asks Jessie Lou to help him, they become friends, to her surprise.

In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

In the year before they become the orphans known as the Boxcar children, Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden live with their parents at Fair Meadow Farm, where, although times are hard, they take in a family who has been stranded in their car during a blizzard.

Elliot the little elephant and his best friend, Mouse, play hide-and-seek during an autumn vacation in the countryside.

City mouse William Gray and country mouse Tansy become good friends who enjoy visiting each other in the country and the city, but they miss each other when they are apart--is there a way for them to meet halfway without giving up the city and country lives they love?

A boy enjoys his car trip to the country to visit his grandparents.

On a short winter day, Samuel and his father enter into a series of trades with neighbors and strangers until they come home with a brown-eyed milk cow for Mama.

In 1945, in Florida, ten-year-old Birdie Boyer and her family struggle to make their new farm prosper despite heat, droughts, cold snaps, and rowdy neighbors.

This propulsive adventure takes readers on a first hunt in the American wilderness--and face to face with the choice to kill or not to kill.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia hasn't seen her father since she was eight months old. But when he summons her out of the blue, Olivia travels cross country to New Hampshire to meet him. That summer, she learns to adapt to rural life and to try to understand her reclusive father. The next summer, following high school graduation, she returns to recreate her father's seventy-mile annual bike ride-reflecting on her own personal journey to understand the true...