In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle 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.

While celebrating her brother's Bar Mitzvah on Coney Island, nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin disobeys by going off on her own, leaving her cousin Ana, a recent immigrant, alone.

Nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin eagerly helps her cousin Ana, newly arrived from Russia, to adjust to life in New York City, but when their teacher says the two must sing together at a school assembly, Rebecca worries that her big moment will be ruined.

Josefina hopes to become a "curandera" or healer like Tía Magdalena, and she is tested just before her tenth birthday when a friend receives a potentially fatal snakebite.

While Rebecca Rubin helps her building's ailing superintendent take care of his homing pigeons, she puzzles over what to do with the Christmas centerpiece her teacher insisted she make but which has no place in her Jewish home.

In 1974, after Julie's parents divorce, she moves to a new San Francisco neighborhood where the school does not have a girls' basketball team, so she fights for the right to play on the boys' team.