Budding costume designer Lola lives an extraordinary life in San Francisco with her two dads and beloved dog, dating a punk rocker, but when the Bell twins return to the house next door Lola recalls both the friendship-ending fight with Calliope, a figure skater, and the childhood crush she had on Cricket.

"A little girl's daddy steps in to help her arrange her curly, coiling, wild hair into styles that allow her to be her natural, beautiful self." --

"Avid baker Zoe Washington receives a letter on her twelfth birthday from her biological father, who is in prison for a terrible crime"--

When their father eats so much that he pops the buttons off his britches, each of his three daughters tries a different plan to find replacements.

Family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job.

"Barnacle Garrick is bold and saucy and selfish. And for a pirate captain, that's good, very good. And his crew are all scurvy sea dogs--selfish down to the last fleabitten scuttle-butt. And that's good too. But Augusta Garrick is shy, polite, and selfless. For a pirate, that's bad, very bad. Despite her father's horrible example, the sea pup can't stop helping out. It just might take one terrible storm, a ripped sail, a missing peg leg and a panicked...

After her mother's death, twelve-year-old Molly learns that her father is a basketball star for the Boston Celtics.

When her grandmother moves into a nursing home, twelve-year-old Phoebe sets out in the old family car with three of Gram's servants, on a search for the father who abandoned her at birth.

Sixteen-year-old Chelsea has always been overweight, and now in high school she is being unmercifully teased by other students, and even her mother gives her no support, despite her beautiful singing voice--but in film class she is assigned work on a film with Melody and for the first time she finds someone other than her father who does not criticize her, and finally finds the confidence to try out for the school choir.