Deja is ten and her family of five live in a homeless shelter. She doesn’t understand why her father can’t work. At her new school, the curriculum explores home, community and the two towers that were once visible from the school’s windows

Foster care

As a young boy born into slavery in Virginia, Alec Turner was forbidden to learn to read.

A young girl dreams of flying above herself and her Harlem home, claiming all she sees for herself and her family. Based on the author's quilt painting of the same name.

A Vietnamese girl plants six lima beans in a Cleveland vacant lot.

Describes a thirteen-year-old Mexican girl's fall from riches, her immigration to California and her growing awareness of class and ethnic tensions.

Each spring Anna leaves her home in Mexico and travels north with her family where they will work on farms. The Low German-speaking Mennonites from Mexico are a unique group of migrants who moved from Canada to Mexico in the 1920s and became an important part of the farming community there. But it has become increasingly difficult for them to earn a livelihood, and so they come back to Canada each year as migrant workers in order to survive. And while they currently have the right to work in Canada, that right may be challenged.

To help her poverty-stricken family, thirteen-year-old Lupita enters California as an illegal immigrant and starts to work while constantly on the watch for "la migra."

Emma Turner loves books and dreams of one day having the store-bought kind, but the Turners are migrant workers and money is tight.