Seven children from Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp - ranging in age from 6 to 19 - share their individual stories of coping with critical illness, as they try to experience life as fully, and normally, as possible. The book describes the children attending school, maintaining friendships, discovering the opposite sex and falling in love amidst hospitals, radiation, chemotherapy treatments and surgery. Their accounts, interspersed with their poetry, are unusually engaging, with each chapter reflecting a very different personality and attitude towards life, illness, remission, religion, families and friends, the future and death.