With the advice of her stepfather, eleven-year-old Katie takes on the job of feeding an abused junkyard dog and building it a doghouse for shelter during the hard winter.

Alex feels that he does not have much in common with his stepfather Jake until a fuzzy spider brings them together.

Mischa knows what it is to be abandoned. His German father disappeared at the end of the war, leaving him and his mother to endure the hatred and contempt of all the French villagers, the two of them against the world. And his surrogate father vanishes too, with no word of explanation. Mischa bears these scars into manhood. Only when his mother dies, revealing the existence of a priceless masterpiece, does he go on the trail of his own history. He...

Twelve-year-old Trevor has an adult problem to deal with: how to protect himself, his sisters, and his mother from his abusive stepfather, who is currently in prison. He takes up boxing, figuring if he learns how to build himself up, nobody can knock him down. Trev is a talented artist-- and others are advising him to follow that path to the future, rather than fighting. When the boyfriend of one of his sisters becomes disrespectful and threatens...

"They burned her home. They stole her brother and sister. But vengeance is following. Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she'll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she's not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb's buried a bloody past of his own. And out in the lawless...