Valerie Tripp

While her father is away fighting in World War II, Molly finds her life full of change as she eats terrible vegetables from the victory garden and plans revenge on her brother for ruining her Halloween.

On a visit to Cincinnati from rural Kentucky during the Great Depression, Aunt Millie impresses Kit with her money-saving cleverness.

In 1929 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression, both at home where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.

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

Josefina and her sisters distrust learning to read and write, as well as other changes their Tia Dolores is bringing to the household, because they fear they will lose their memories of their mother.

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncles comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper, and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.