A young girl works to impress her highly critical parents and submits to a terrible fate as she struggles to meet their impossible standards.

When a boy comes to a new town after the death of a loved one, he struggles to perform daily tasks and adapt to the unfamiliar surroundings.

On a cold December day, parents grieve for their son who was killed in a football game. A friend of their son helps them realize their son may have hid the feelings he was too afraid to show.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

A little girl navigates her relationships with two boys in her elementary school class, a brash bully and a shy victim, and learns about the nature of suffering.

A five year old child to a new home in a sandy region near miners and must navigate the seemingly random changes and curious characters she meets along the way.

After a lifetime of secrecy, a young girls father finally includes her in the family business, giving her a sense of belonging while also drawing her into the generational curse that comes with a life of taking on other people's pain to allow them a peaceful death.

An orphan boy has a chance encounter with a strange woman who lives up the street from him. Without any guardians to protect him, the boy is coerced into transforming, becoming unrecognizable in the process.

After a ten-year-old boy joins his parents in bidding his grandfather farewell as he leaves New York for Germany, he experiences the first major loss of his youth and struggles to understand the complexity of the experience.

A four-year-old black boy vaguely recalls a mixture of occurrences that puzzled him, including a sentenced hanging in his town of a man who allegedly murdered his wife.