Rachel Kalama, forcibly removed from her idyllic Honolulu home in the 1890s when it is discovered she has leprosy, grows up in the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i where she forms a family of friends, and meets the man who will one day become her husband.
In the late nineteenth century, twelve-year-old Liliha is sent to the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony at Molokai, Hawaii, where she struggles to endure savage living conditions and people, as well as her own disease.
