Henry Carter Hull

Ella Turner does her best to fit in to the small, close-knit community of Lisle-sur-Tarn. She even changes her name back to Tournier, and learns French. In vain. Isolated and lonely, she is drawn to investigate her Tournier ancestry, which leads to her encounter with the town's wolfish librarian. Isabelle du Moulin, known as Le Rousse due to her fiery red hair, is tormented and shunned in the village suspected of witchcraft and reviled for her association...

Describes the lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, who is caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness. Her dilemma is intensified by the fact that she lives in a small, self-satisfied, Midwestern town.

Latina novelist Alma Huebner begs off joining her husband on a humanitarian mission to the Dominican Republic to work on her next book, and finds herself becoming obsessed with the life of her subject--a woman who hand-picked a group of orphan boys to serve as live carriers of the small pox virus in order to provide Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis a ready supply of vaccine with which to inoculate the populations of Spain's American colonies in 1803....