Though 13-year-old Mary is happy to keep quiet about the secret instruction she receives at Miss Prudence Crandall's private school for the daughters of the richest families in New England, Mary's sister Sarah glories in the fuss she creates when she is openly admitted. When Miss Prudence replaces the school's white students with little misses of color, all sides of the anti-slavery movement want to use the school to further their own agendas - with Mary and Sarah caught in the middle!

Claire Louise Corbet has never had trouble making up her mind. She knows what she wants and how to get it. But when the Yankee soldiers shell their town, she begins to discover that decisions are not always black and white, and they are anything but easy.

Rose Frampton is content with life on her family's plantation in South Carolina, but the year 1900 brings many changes for the 15-year-old. She could never imagine that she would marry a Yankee and become the mistress of a New York City estate. Uprooted from the tranquil shores of Saint Helena's Island, she comes to know and love Rene, learns to make her own decisions, and finds an untapped inner strength.

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Marsh is nanny to John and Abigail Adams' children and witnesses firsthand how tension builds in the feisty New England town in the two years before it erupts in the Boston Massacre. Friends become foes and families divide as British troops arrive in 1768 to force the outspoken Bostonians to toe the line and obey the British government.