In the journal she is keeping for English class, sixteen-year-old Tish chronicles the changes in her life when her abusive father abandons her and her brother, and her mother follows him.

Melly and Anny Beth agree to participate in Project Turnabout, a scientific experiment in which they are given a shot that will make them grow younger, until they receive a second injection that will stop the aging process, but when other participants die after receiving the second shot, Melly and Anny Beth refuse to have the shot and set out to find someone to care for them when they are too young to do it themselves.

After her father is convicted of embezzlement, Becca Jones, fourteen, and her mother flee Georgia for small-town Ohio but three years later she learns that his misdeeds may have jeopardized not just her future but also her life.

After joining her new friends in the religious group called Fishers of Men, Dorry finds herself immersed in a cult from which she must struggle to extricate herself.