When Jack and Annie travel back to the Kansas prairie in search of "something to learn," they gain an understanding of how hard life was for pioneers and they experience the terror of a tornado.

Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.

Twelve-year-old Henry York, finally reunited with his family, works with them and the Chestnut King, the long-deposed and mythic leader of the faeren people, to destroy Nimiane and her forces of evil.

When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, Pa pulls twelve-year-old May from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.