A forgetful boy gets himself into trouble when he repeats what each person he meets on the road says to him.

"For generations, Sybaline Shaw's family has lived in an enchanted valley in the Appalachian Mountains, using their magic to help grow the land. But now the government has built a dam that will force the Shaws to relocate, and they're running out of time before their home will be flooded"--

Enrolled in school after her mother's death, Possum resolves to preserve her mother's homeschooling lessons by proving she already knows everything, an unsuccessful endeavor complicated by her teacher's attraction to Possum's father.

Minna proudly wears her new coat made of clothing scraps to school, where the other children laugh at her until she tells them the stories behind the scraps.

Inspired by his grandfather's last words and guided by a girl who believes they are saints, fourteen-year-old Archie sets out on a spiritual quest that takes him from southern Appalachia to the Cloisters Museum in New York City.

Suspected of attacking a boy from town and determined to protect her secrets and her twin sister, Jo flees into the woods, where she discovers the truth behind her mother's disappearance fifteen years ago.

In the 1880s, young Fanny McCoy witnesses the growth of a terrible and violent feud between her Kentucky family and the West Virginia Hatfields, complicated by her older sister Roseanna's romance with a Hatfield.

In this Appalachian version of The Kind and the Unkind Girls, two sisters--Bess and Tess--are sent by their mother to draw water from the Well-at-the-End-of-the-World. Along the way they meet a bear, a mountain lion, a wild boar, and three little foxes. When Bess greets them with courtesy and respect, the foxes reward her kindness. Tess, greedy for her own bounty, can't be bothered with manners; she bonks the animals with her bucket, kicks them with...

In the poverty of the Appalachian coal country in 1908, eight-year-old Minna's life gets even more difficult after her father dies of black lung, and that winter she cannot go to school because she does not have a coat--until the quilting mothers make her a coat using pieces of cloth from their own lives, each with a special story behind it.