Meissner, Susan

"Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943--aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences. But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her"--.

"World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Resistance spy. Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic andbe reunited with their American husbands. Their new lives in the United States brightly beckon until their tightly-held secrets are laid bare in their shared stateroom. When the voyage ends at New York Harbor, only one of them will disembark... Present day. Facing a crossroads in her own life, Brette Caslake visits the famously haunted Queen Mary at the request of an old friend. What she finds will set her on a course to solve a seventy-year-old tragedy that will draw her into the heartaches and triumphs of the courageous war brides--and will ultimately lead her to reconsider what she has to sacrifice to achieve her own deepest longings."--Provided by publisher.

"In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters--Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa--a chance at a better life. Their dreams are short-lived. Just months after they arrive, the Spanish Flu reaches the shores of America. As the pandemic claims more than twelve thousand victims in their adopted city, they find their lives left with a world that looks nothing like the one they knew. But even as they lose loved ones, they take in a baby orphaned by the disease who becomes their single source of hope. Amidst the tragedy and challenges that surround them, they learn what they cannot live without--and what they are willing to do about it"--Provided by publisher.

Rachael received anonymous notes about a long-buried body of a 15-year-old boy that is found and searches out the identity of the writer.

A baby is found abandoned and Rachael digs for the truth of what really happened...and who is responsible.

A beautiful embroidered scarf connects two women across generations. Clara Wood mourns the man she loved who died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Manhattan. In 2011, widow Taryn Michaels is raising her daughter alone when a photograph in a magazine recalls her husband's death in the World Trade Towers. The scarf reaches across the years to show both women forces at work in their lives.

Lauren Durough leaves her life of privilege to take a part-time job transcribing the journal entries of Mercy Hayworth, a victim of the Salem witch trials, and as she is pulled into Mercy's life, she discovers many of Mercy's traits and trials live on in her ancestor, Lauren's new boss.

After her father leaves, sixteen-year-old Tally is taken in by her aunt, and while helping her cousin Chase interview two Holocaust survivors for a sociology project, the pair uncovers hidden secrets within their own family's past.