Eight-year-old Henry and nine-year-old Chin love to read about heroes in popular "penny dreadful" novels, until they both witness real courage while trying to survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Recounts the journey of the Donner Party which, in 1846, sought to travel from Independence, Missouri, to California but took an untried shortcut that trapped them in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a terrible winter.

"Two years after her parents' surprising and painful split, twelve-year-old Jo and her mom find themselves on the 100-mile hike on the Superior Hiking Trail along Lake Superior's north shore--a journey that Jo had always looked forward to hiking with her dad. It's not a situation that either of them ever predicted they'd find themselves in, yet here they are in the wilderness with their entire lives stuffed into a pair of thirty-pound packs. Along...

Legend of cougar canyon: The adventure of two young friends who must enter a canyon they have been told is haunted to rescue a young goat from a hungry mountain lion. Toby McTeague: Fifteen-year-old Toby McTeague and his father Tom breed the huskies used in championship racing. Tom, a four time winner of the upcoming regional dog-team championship, is injured and Toby fights for the chance to take his place.

Relates how 100 young schoolgirls, many of them orphans, and their teachers managed to escape the chaos of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, l944, by taking shelter in an iron mine for thirty-eight days and, after being forced out by the Germans, walking for twenty-nine days to reach safety behind Allied lines.

After a plane crash, thirteen-year-old Brian spends fifty-four days in the wilderness, learning to survive with only the aid of a hatchet given him by his mother, and learning also to survive his parents' divorce.