Ten-year-old Rosa hopes that her mother, whom she has not seen for three years, will leave her job in New York and come home to Santa Catarina, Mexico, for Christmas and maybe even longer. Includes a glossary of Spanish words used.
On Whidbey Island, Washington, fourteen-year-old Casey has two goals--to become an excellent basketball player like her mother was, and to find the hit-and-run driver who injured her and killed her mother nine years earlier.
In 1906, mortified by her mother's suffragist activities that cause the family to move from New York City to Cape Light, fourteen-year-old Rose sees no value in her mother's feminist views until she tries to enter a horse riding competition open only to boys.
When eleven-year-old Sam visits her grandfather's ranch for the first time, she finds a new life very different from the one she has known with her vagabond mother and discovers what really matters most to her.
Spending Christmas together for the first time in the absence of the father of the house, a mother and daughter fix up old dolls for other little girls.