Third-grader Clementine tries to adjust to the news that her perfect family of four is adding a new brother or sister.

A little brother thinks of the ways he will someday get revenge on his older brother.

"In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable....

A young cat envies her brother the pampered treatment he gets when he is sick in bed until she gets sick too.