A working class man who wants his children to have everything their rich friends have purchases "Semplica Girls" — girls formerly living in poverty who sign contracts to hang as ornaments in people's yards — for his older daughter's birthday. When his younger daughter frees the Semplica Girls, the family is plunged into financial disaster.

A Black, southern house servant with internalized racism, joins her mistress on a visit to another region, where she observes Black people acting with something she abhors: autonomy.

In a dystopian society, a young widow is placed in a holding facility to spend her days learning home economics until she's chosen to be the wife of a new man.

In a society where the top one percent rules the lower classes, a teenage girl is forced out of her home by ethnic cleansing and must turn to a wealthy man in order to survive.

A working-class mother has held only one hope for her entire life: that one day, her daughter would marry well and wealthy, and take care of her in her old age. When her daughter reveals that the man she loves is not wealthy, her mother's dreams of rest are dashed and divided.

After her 10-year-old brother dies from AIDS, an adolescent girl's family moves to a less affluent neighborhood in Florida due to their extensive medical bills. When the girl babysits her new neighbors, two young Black girls, she reckons with subtle questions around race, wealth, class, and grief.

Consumed in a disturbing relationship with an older woman, a girl from Ohio slips through the impoverished side of New York City in search of an experience that she thinks will make her a woman in what she knows is a man’s world.

A wealthy man in Chicago suddenly learns about the untimely death of a poor woman he'd been dating. Confronted with her child, whom he'd begun to develop a bond with, he must determine to what extent he will allow his greed to overcome his compassion.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.

Compiling notes for an English essay, a sixteen-year-old girl recounts her middle-class upbringing, kleptomania, and eventual coercion into prostitution and assisting with drug use. After she suffers violence and abuse, she is eventually rescued — but the experience traumatizes her.