Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family. Ted Hammond learns that in a very small town, there's no such thing as an isolated event. And the solution of one mystery is often the beginning of another.

"When her aunt gets into a car accident, Anise is forced to leave her friends and surfing behind to spend the summer in Nebraska to help care for her cousins. In doing so, she forms familial bonds and new friendships that challenge her feelings of abandonment by her mother. When Lincoln, a one-armed skater, dares her to swap her surfboard for a skateboard, Anise isn't one to shy away from a challenge." --

Following her father's death from a disease that swept through her Nebraska town in 1881, teenaged Sarah Jane must find work to support herself and records in her diary her experiences as a young school teacher.

"Bono met his wife in high school," Park says. "So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers. "I'm not kidding," he says. "You should be," she says, "we're 16." "What about Romeo and Juliet?" "Shallow, confused, then dead." Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits -- smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember...

"A successful lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with an immigrant Bohemian girl."--

"Eleven-year-old Perry was born and raised by his mom at the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility in tiny Surprise, Nebraska. His mom is a resident on Cell Block C, and so far Warden Daugherty has made it possible for them to be together. That is, until a new district attorney discovers the truth--and Perry is removed from the facility and forced into a foster home. When Perry moves to the "outside" world, he feels trapped. Desperate to be reunited...

Young Elsie must find a way to adapt to her new home on the Nebraska prairie after she and her father leave their comfortable city life in Boston.

A young girl in an American village goes to Chicago to study music, falls in love with a middle-aged singer, knows a brief moment of contentment, and then the pain of a separation that is final.

Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family.

Louisa's life in a loving pioneer family on the Nebraska prairie is altered by the arrival of a new doctor and his beautiful, tragically frail wife.