Ten-year-old Beans Curry, a member of the Keepsies, the best marble playing gang in Depression-era Key West, Florida, engages in various schemes to earn money while "New Dealers" from Washington, D.C., arrive to turn run down Key West into a tourist resort.

When her father's business closes because of the Great Depression forcing Kit to make changes in her life, the nine-year-old responds with resourcefulness.

Tired of doing chores and longing for adventure during the Great Depression, Kit meets a hobo and decides to hop a freight train.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

"Ruthie Smithens, a girl who loves fairy tales and happy endings, doesn't mind being "goofy Ruthie" if it makes her best friend, Kit Kittredge, smile and forget about the hardships of the Depression. But when Ruthie finds out that the Kittredges are going to be evicted from their house, she makes up her mind to help ..."--Page 4 of cover.

Deza Malone, the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, accompanies her mother and older brother on a trip to find her father, an African American man who left to find work after the Great Depression hit. They end up in a Hooverville outside of Flint, Michigan, and her brother attempts to be a performer while Deza and her mother search for a home.

When twelve-year-old Ellie and her family lose their livelihood and move to a mountain cabin in 1934, she quickly learns to be an outdoors woman and, when needed, a healer.

"Times are hard in Depression-era Georgia mountain country. Even so, fourteen-year-old Halley Owenby, her younger brother Robbie, and their parents Jim and Kate manage to get by until Jim dies suddenly in an accident, and Kate decides she and her children have no choice but to move in with her parents"--Dust jacket flap.

During the Depression in the Louisiana bayou, a curious young girl helps the "Swamp Ghost" that her cousins warned her about and finds herself with one good friend.

In 1934, eleven-year-old Terpsichore's father signs up for President Roosevelt's Palmer Colony project, uprooting the family from Wisconsin to become pioneers in Alaska, where Terpsichore refuses to let rough conditions and first impressions get in the way of her grand adventure.