For six straight years, Jack’s parents have forgotten to pick him up at the end of summer camp, leaving him stranded there year-round. But this summer, Jack’s dragon egg, a childhood gift from his grandmother, is finally going to hatch. While the egg offers Jack a chance at escape, it also comes between him and Nancy, his only friend.

A progressive and bitter father going through a mid-life crisis goes on holiday to a water park with his wife and excitable son. He casually confronts racist and irritable guests while trying to figure out how to be a good dad.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

A family, bereaved at the tragic loss of their daughter, founds and runs a camp in her name—and with her settlement money.

A teenage girl is swept into the wealthy side of her coastal town by her new boyfriend, but soon finds that she longs for adventure and freedom outside of his superficial social scene.

A New Yorker tired of the cold seeks to make the most of the year’s first spring breeze with her resistant husband.

A family goes into the city to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of one of their sons. The siblings all have new experiences during a city-wide festival, and each finds themselves a bit more grown up by the end of the night.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

A writer summers with his mistress and part of her family. The group runs into one of his former students, and they all smoke together.

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.