Laurie is a little girl who would love to be like other children, but her hearing problems can make that difficult, until she goes to the ear doctor and gets new hearing aids that allow her to hear things around her clearly.

Struggling to overcome his hearing impairment and the way people look at him, Landon joins the football team in order to prove himself with little initial success, until Brett Bell and his family befriend him.

"Doctors have been able to cure some forms of congenital blindness and deafness for decades. But this has created another problem: most people end up hating their new senses. To ask someone to adapt to a new sense is to ask them to reshape their entire world. Many simply cannot. Every waking minute, they are bombarded by meaningless sights or sounds. Some sink into a depression so great that they lose their will to live and die. So then what to do...

"Eleven-year-old Van Markson embarks on a quest to rescue his best friend from a dangerous wish collector"--

It is 1904 and the partially deaf Asta Hedstrom is engaged to Nils, but she does not want to marry him: she would rather spend her time with her best friend Gunnar Fuglestad and his secret boyfriend, Erlend, who belongs to the wealthiest family on their Norwegian island; so when Nils gravely injures Gunnar, she shuns her marriage and moves in with Gunnar and Erlend in a secluded cabin above town--and the three misfits set out to win the annual Christmas...

Lives of four misfits are intertwined when a bully's prank lands shy Virgil at the bottom of a well and Valencia, Kaori, and Gen band together in an epic quest to find and rescue him.

Overlooked in class, a hearing-impaired boy who collects lost or discarded trinkets discovers a dangerous underground world full of stolen wishes and the people who collect them.