Lucy Grealy describes her journey to find physical beauty after surgery left her face disfigured.

The author describes her twenty-year friendship with Lucy Grealy, tracing their introduction at a writer's workshop, the integral part their friendship played in their writing careers, and her witness to Grealy's medical deterioration.

A grandfather and his blind grandson, Boy-Strength-of-Blue-Horses, reminisce about the young boy's birth, his first horse, and an exciting horse race.

All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school--and life in general--with a minimum of effort. But that's before he's given the news that he's dying. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure--if he's willing to go in search of it. Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen year-old who, after being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob's (aka mad cow)...

Ruby wants to be a teacher, but after her father's death in a logging accident she must quit school to care for her ten brothers and sisters, until a chance meeting with a lonely old blind woman transforms her life.