After a day of picking cotton in late 1860, Ella May, a young slave, joins her friends Bobby and Sue at their second job of listening outside the windows of their master's house for useful information.
Left an orphan after the influenza epidemic in British East Africa in 1919, thirteen-year-old Rachel is tricked into assuming a deceased neighbor's identity to travel to England, where her only dream is to return to Africa and rebuild her parents' mission hospital.
"In Depression-era northern Michigan, a young boy meets a teenager serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the work relief program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to employ millions of young men during the Great Depression"--
In 1818 Mary O'Shea must decide whether to remain on Michilmackinac Island and marry her dear Indian friend White Hawk or to accept the proposal of James, an English nobleman, and to go with him to London.
Although it will mean that their father can no longer make a living running a ferry boat, thirteen-year-old Mark and his brother Luke are excited about the building of a five-mile bridge across the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan in 1957.
Twelve-year-old Mary and her older brother and sister tend the family farm on Michigan's Mackinac Island while their father is away fighting the British in the War of 1812.