Despite her interfering stage mother, seventeen-year-old Abby, a former child movie star, pursues her dream of becoming an actress in Hollywood during World War II.
Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.
Sent away on an orphan train by his self-centered father Jessie, Will keeps hoping Jessie will return to claim him, even though the people he lives with care for him far more.
Eleven-year-old orphan train rider David Howard settles with a strict Texas farm family, and his best friend is an ex-slave who is threatened by the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Deeply unhappy about her family's separation because of poverty, Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.