Living in a small beach community with her mother, fifteen-year-old Claire, an accomplished swimmer, discovers that, like her long-dead but, still very much present, grandmother, she has the ability to inhabit other people's bodies while asleep.

You'd think that Polly Martin would have all the answers when it comes to love since her grandmother is the famouse syndicated advice columnist Miss Swoon. But after a year of dating disasters, Polly has sworn off love. Now she's working for the summer at Wild Waves Western-themed water park, supervised by a former boyfriend. But then her grandmother moves in for the summer and becomes a man-crazy sexagenarian. During the summer Polly must face...

Josie, who lives with her mother and grandmother and has cerebral palsy, befriends a boy who moves into one of the rich houses behind her old farmhouse.

When her grandmother sends her alone on a difficult journey up North, fourteen-year-old Amanda encounters the exploitation of women in textile mills.

To be more like her best friend, eleven-year-old Justine decides to give up Judaism to become Catholic, but after her beloved, religious grandmother dies, she realizes that she needs to seek her own way of being Jewish.

Alternates between two stories--comtemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

Fourteen-year-old Annie, along with her two best friends, tries desperately to save her grandmother's beloved, old-fashioned teashop in Madison, Wisconsin, while she also learns to accept the inevitability of change in life. Includes proverbs, quotations, and brief stories about tea, as well as recipes.

Twelve-year-old Annie and her younger brother, Ted, try to cope with their turbulent emotions, as well as with their grandmother's terrible anger and grief, after their father kills their mother and then commits suicide.

After having been sent, at a very young age, from New York to live with her grandmother in Haiti, fourteen-year-old Mardi returns to join her parents and try to shape a new life in Brooklyn.

When Elizabeth, an eleven-year-old foster child, is adopted by the boisterous, openly affectionate Sheridan family, it is Grandma who decides to use a fresh approach in trying to help her connect with her new family.