Abandoned by her white father, thirteen-year-old Red Dove faces another lean winter with her Lakota family on the Great Plains. Willful and proud, she is presented with a stark choice: leave her people to live in the white world, or stay and watch them starve. Red Dove begins a journey to find her place in the world and discovers that her greatest power comes from within herself.

In 1770, the slave Esperança Garcia bravely penned a letter to the governor of Piauí state, in Brazil, describing how she and her children were being mistreated and requesting permission to return to the farm where the rest of her family was living. Before she wrote her letter, Esperança Garcia lived on a cotton farm run by Jesuit priests, where she learned to read and write - a rare opportunity for a woman, especially a slave. But one day she...

Just as twelve-year-old Ferrell Savage is beginning to think of Mary Vittles, his life-long friend, as a potential girlfriend, a new boy at school blackmails them with a family secret--that one of Ferrell's ancestors ate one of Mary's.