Imagines the life story of Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," describing the simple life she led on a remote Maine farm, her complicated relationship with her family, and the illness that incapacitated her.

While her father is in the hospital, thirteen-year-old Isla befriends Harry, the first boy to understand her love of the outdoors, and as Harry's health fails, Isla tries to help both him and the lone swan they see, struggling to fly, on the lake outside Harry's window.

Having spent several years in and out of hospitals for a life-threatening illness, pragmatic sixteen-year-old Cam is relocated by her miracle-seeking mother to a town in Maine known for its mystical healing qualities.

Grandpa helps his favorite grandpup to avoid scratching his chicken pox by telling how he once had to fight off an octopus during a terrible storm.

"Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her...

On Cape Cod in 1972, eleven-year-old Naomi, known as Chirp for her love of birds, gets help from neighbor Joey as she struggles to cope with her mother's multiple sclerosis and its effect on her father and sister.

"Seventeen-year-old Rose Levenson must decide whether or not she wants to take the test to find out if she has Huntington's disease, the degenerative disease that is slowly killing her mother"--

When Squish, a meek amoeba who loves the comic book exploits of his favorite hero, "Super Amoeba," starts feeling sick, he worries he has caught a deadly illness.

An illness cursing the land forces seventeen-year-old Vega, the Last Astronomer, to venture across the wilderness to discover the stars message that will save her people.

When Sophie Mouse's brother, Winston, gets sick, she starts to envy all the attention he is getting, but when she gets sick herself, she regrets ever wishing this on herself.