This story chronicles the lifelong friendship between the Morgans, a young couple with talent and dreams but no prospects or connections, and the Langs, a wealthy couple generous enough to share their good fortune.

When Rebecca attends summer camp in the country because of the spreading polio epidemic in New York City, she is troubled by a bully in her tent and another fellow camper who is strangely secretive.

In 1940s New Orleans, Fish Elliot is a polio-survivor with a knack for inventing and building things, and his African American neighbor Olympia is a girl with a talent for messing things up, but they are united in an effort to save a starving stray dog they call Liberty--and when Liberty is caged by a nasty farmer, they find an unlikely ally in a German prisoner of war, Erich, who is not much older than the two children.

"In the aftermath of the Korean War, Peggy's small hometown is rife with anti-Communist hysteria. But Peggy has bigger problems: She's struggling to recover from polio. Taunted by her classmates, Peggy just wants to be left alone, but then she stumbles across a mysterious object that gives her the power to fly. Unscrupulous operatives from the American and Soviet governments seek the object to overturn the tense political stalemate, and Peggy finds...

In 1941, circumstances bring together Brick, a boy from New York's apple country, and Mariel, a young girl made shy by her bout with polio, and the two make a journey from Brooklyn back to help Brick's elderly neighbors save their apple crop and to help Mariel learn about her past.

In the summer of 1954, eleven-year-old Jesse James MacLean contracts polio, but with a friend's help and despite his unsympathetic father, he finds ways to prove that his spirit is still strong.

Miranda finds it difficult to rehearse for the dance recital after she learns that her mother's poliomyelitis kept her from dancing when she was a child.