A clumsy and unattractive twelve-year-old, Aggie is sure no one will want to adopt her when she rides the orphan train out west, but when she meets the eccentric Bradon family she begins to have some hope. Includes historical information about orphan trains and the woman suffrage movement.
In 1860, having traveled with his young sister from New York to a foster home on a farm near St. Joseph, Missouri, ten-year-old Danny plots to get his newly-widowed foster father to send for and marry his mother.
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.
In 1863, eleven-year-old Peg Kelly is drawn into the dangerous activities of a mysterious young woman who had come to her home in Missouri after fleeing the raid of William Quantrill and his raiders on Lawrence, Kansas.
With her brother in a coma following a hit-and-run accident, a high school senior investigates the incident, stirring up animosity in the small, tight west Texas community where her family has recently moved.
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.
