saint louis (mo.)

Chronicles the history, design, and building of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.

As the family gathers at her grandmother's bed-and-breakfast for a murder mystery weekend, seventeen-year-old Jen confronts her ambivalent feelings about her mother, who disappeared fourteen years earlier, and about the possibility that she might be dead.

Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife, and dominating mother, hopes to match her daughter Laura with an eligible "gentleman caller" while her son Tom supports the family. Laura, lame and painfully shy, evades her mother's schemes and reality by retreating to the make-believe world of her glass animal collection. Tom eventually leaves home to become a writer but is forever haunted by the memory of Laura.

Lee Cotton, the white-skinned, flaxen-haired son of a Scandinavian father and African-American mother, born in Mississippi in 1950, grows up testing the limits of racism, and his life becomes even more complicated by a freak accident, coupled with inventive surgery, that forces him to change his identity once again.

Tumpie, a young African American girl who will later become famous as the dancer Josephine Baker, longs to find the opportunity to dance amid the poverty and vivacious street life of St. Louis in the early 1900s.

Explores the city recognized as the nation's busiest inland river port, describing its history, neighborhoods, and points of interest.