Trapped in a dead Iowa community with no decent boys her age, twelve-year-old Dagmar invents a fantasy boyfriend, who gets her in terrible trouble when he argues with her and makes her talk back to him in front of family and friends.
Orphaned nine-year-old Katie Rose develops a bond with an untamed Mustang on the Stevens' farm where she lives doing chores all day as she dreams of going west to find her uncle.
Jack is practically invisible at home, but when his parents send him to Hazelwood, Iowa, to spend a summer with his odd aunt and uncle, he suddenly makes friends, is beaten up by the town bully, and is plotted against by the richest man in town.
As sixteen-year-old Ellie pursues her two goals--growing the biggest pumpkin in Iowa and losing twenty pounds herself--she strengthens her relationship with her father and meets a young man with interests similar to her own.
The summer after graduating from an Iowa high school, eighteen-year-old Dade Hamilton watches his parents' marriage disintegrate, ends his long-term, secret relationship, comes out of the closet, and savors first love.
Sixteen-year-old Joey's life takes a very strange turn when his mother's tragic death forces him to move from Chicago to rural Iowa with the father he has never known, and who is the town pariah.
