Unlike the other Birthmothers in her utopian community, teenaged Claire forms an attachment to her baby, feeling a great loss when he is taken to the Nurturing Center to be adopted by a family unit.

Saying goodbye can be hard, but in rhyming text dinosaurs teach readers how to say goodbye and deal with separation in a wide variety of situations.

"A boy wakes up one morning to find his father gone. At first, he feels lost. But his father has left him a letter filled with advice to guide him through the times he cannot be there"--

"Piper's older brother leaves Peek-A-Book Island and Piper refuses to take off his old earmuffs, no matter what! Things are going from bad to worse... until she discovers The Fairy Tree"--

After living in an Catholic orphanage for nearly four years, a naive Jewish boy runs away and embarks on a journey across Nazi-occupied Poland to find his parents.

Eleven-year-old Celeste Marconi is a dreamer, a writer, a collector of words. But then a new whispered word trickles into her life: "Subversives." Her beloved country of Chile has been taken over by a military dictatorship, and subversives--people considered a threat to the new government--are in increasing danger. Celeste's doctor-parents must go into hiding to remain safe, and Celeste, heartsick, must say good-bye to them. But the situation continues...

When Papa goes away for a little while, his family tries to cope with the separation by adopting four dogs and a cat.

After Mama takes a job in Chicago during World War II, Ada Ruth stays with Grandma but misses her mother who loves her more than rain and snow.

In early 1940s Poland, ten-year-old Felix and his friend Zelda escape from a cattle car headed to the Nazi death camps and struggle to survive, first on their own and then with Genia, a farmer with her own reasons for hating Germans.

When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.