"Where do baby apes sleep? In apricots! I'm Elsa, and that's one of my jokes (I tell LOTS of jokes and I'm going to be a big star one day). I do my best to cheer my family up - but no one seems to laugh much any more. Not since we lost our lovely house and had to move into a bed and breakfast hotel."

Tina is a triplet, but she's always been the odd one out. Her sisters, Phil and Maddie, are bigger and stronger and better at just about everything. Luckily they look after teeny-tiny Tina wherever they go--but when the girls start in scary, super-strict Miss Lovejoy's class, they're split up, and Tina has to fend for herself for the first time. Tina is horrified when she's paired up with angry bully Selma, with whom nobody wants to be friends.

April knows she was abandoned in a rubbish bin as a newborn baby, fourteen years ago. Now she's happily settled with her foster mother, Marion – but there's a part of April that's desperate to know where she really came from, and who she really is. If only she could remember her real mother – or even find her ...

Dolphin adores her mother, Marigold. She's got wonderful clothes, bright hair and vivid tattoos all over her body – a colourful lady, to match her colourful life. But Dolphin's older sister, Star, is beginning to wonder if living with Marigold's fiery, unpredictable moods is the best thing for the girls.

Ruby and Garnet are ten-year-old twins. They're identical, and they do everything together, especially since their mother died three years earlier – but they couldn't be more different. Bossy, bouncy, funny Ruby loves to take charge, and is desperate to be a famous actress, while quiet, sensitive, academic Garnet loves nothing more than to curl up with one of her favourite books.