A mother and daughter dispute is resolved by the "Yaya sisterhood" - long time friends of the mother.

A lawyer trying to cope with his son's accidental death takes on a case where a farmer is charged with booby trapping a watermelon patch with a shotgun which went off and injured a young boy. But in choosing to defend the farmer, he puts himself at odds with the boy's father, an old friend who is politically influential. In dealing with this case, he is forced to confront his own son's death and his wife's slippage into being a virtual recluse.

In the piano-making town of Grand, Pennsylvania, Janice Pasetti keeps house for factory owner Harris Weldon, his newlywed niece and her husband, while raising her teenage daughter.

A French girl is kidnapped and sold as slave to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire.