Upon learning that an older woman has moved into run-down, creepy Crabapple Farm, nine-year-old Keeker rides over on her pony, Plum, to find out whether the woman is a witch.

In a radical departure from her urban life, Ann Turner buys a piece of remote Vermont land and sets up a tent home in deep forest. She's trying to escape an unending string of personal disasters in Boston; more, she desperately wants to leave behind a world she sees as increasingly defined by consumerism, hypocrisy, and division.As she writes in her journal, "There's got to be a more honest, less divided way to live." She soon learns she was mistaken...

During the Vermont flood of 1927, a girl and her grandparents share their new hilltop house with neighbors and animals.

Heinrich and Friedrich, two brothers in Prussia in the 1880s, travel separately to America and end up working on adjacent farms in Vermont.

With his father in the Army Air Corps and his mother diagnosed with tuberculosis, thirteen-year-old Gus sets out to incubate a nest of orphaned duck eggs on his grandparents' farm in Vermont.

As fifteen-year-old Kit does chores on her family's Vermont farm, she puzzles over her mother's apparent unhappiness, complains about being homeschooled after a minor incident at school, and strives to communicate just how important dance is to her.

During the summer of 1932 when Lily is twelve years old, she is granted her two greatest wishes, to be far from the sister who torments her and to have a horse of her own, but she does not expect either the tragic events that bring this about or their consequences.