A divorced 16 year old girl reflects on how the sexual trauma she experienced as a child perpetuates in her relationships with men throughout her life, forcing herself to grow up too early and leaving her starved for affection and love.

With plans to head home the minute the clock strikes 4:30, a young girl arrives at a birthday party fashionably late and realizes she is the only guest who came.

A teenager learns how to cope with the premature loss of his father. Through a newly developed relationship with his uncle, he discovers a new version of his father he wasn't privy to during his life.

Set in 1914 Detroit, a young man with a life threatening condition is forced to live a mundane life protected from the outside world. When a new friend begins showing him the joys life has to offer, he is forced to decide how he wants to live.

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.

While they were originally set on different paths after graduation, a young boy and girl get engaged. They decide to have their teacher as their witness, but once they discover their teacher had killed herself, they break their engagement.

Amongst problems with her ungrateful children and ex-husband, a middle-aged mother deals with a burgeoning mid-life crisis — until she realizes that she has become miraculously pregnant.

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 father facing mental and physical debilitations has his sights set on capturing a drop of sunlight to bring joy to everyone in his small hometown. Despite his good deed, the town finds it necessary to deliberate: is this man an alcoholic, mentally ill, or a criminal?

After their only child dies during his gap year abroad, a woman reflects on her relationship with her husband and comes to understand that they deal with fear and grief in different ways.