A LaFaye

Uncertain of where she really belongs, thirteen-year-old Nissa leaves her Louisiana home where she lives with her father and new stepmother and goes to stay with her eccentric mother in Chicago.

When Dede sees a notice offering land for black people in Kansas, her family decides to quit sharecropping and become homesteading pioneers.

Born into a family with artistry in their fingers, Lyza laments that her only talent is carving letters into wood. That is until her life is turned upside down when her mother succumbs to the influenza pandemic of 1918, which is devastating their small coastal town in Maine. With her mother gone, Lyza must protect her eccentric father, who runs the risk of being committed, especially now that he claims he's waiting for the return of his dead wife....

At the end of the Civil War, young Gabe meets many other former slaves getting a feel for freedom whose kindness helps him in his quest to find his mother, who was sold away.

Fourteen-year-old Stella, orphaned just after the Civil War, fights to keep her family's plantation and fulfill her father's desire to turn land over to the people who have worked on it for generations, but first she must find her father's hidden deed and will.