Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

In the wilderness lake country of northern Minnesota, an orphaned twelve-year-old girl and a wolf pup share a rare bond.

In 1856, Kirsten and her cousins look after the farm while the adults go to town for supplies, and everything is fine--until a blizzard surprises them.

In 1854, ten-year-old Kirsten, living with her family in Minnesota, meets a raiding party of Ojibway Indians and finds unexpected help when her dog is in danger.

It's Halloween night, and ghouls, goblins, and monsters from all around the state arrive at a little boy's door to give him a special treat.

Carley recalls the extraordinary summer when, as a troubled fourteen-year-old, he first came to northern Minnesota to stay with his blacksmith Uncle David and gained not only new skills but also a new sense of himself.

"Each member of Erik Sheepflattener's modern-day Viking-heritage family has a motto to live by. Erik is developing a motto he can truly believe in : AVOID STUFF. But when he and his older sister Brunhilde spend the summer with their rough-and-tumble cousins in Minnesota, axe-wielding Bru gets the idea to name and conquer all of Erik's fears."

When Kirsten's new friend Erik disappears, she has to figure out whether he ran away to get out of some promises he made, or whether something else has happened.

Since the death of his older brother, thirteen-year-old Billy Baggs has had a distant relationship with his father, but life on their farm in northern Minnesota begins to change when he starts to play baseball.

For Adam Reed, basketball is a passport. Adam s basketball skills have taken him from an orphanage in Poland to a loving adoptive mother in Minnesota. When he s tapped to play on a select AAU team along with some of the best players in the state, it just confirms that basketball is his ticket to the good life: to new friendships, to the girl of his dreams, to a better future.