The Snow Baby

News of Marie Ahnighito Peary’ birth on an icy bay in northern Greenland spread around the globe, shocking Victorian society. The daughter of prominent American parents had been born in a tarred lodge at the edge of the known world! Even the Inuit who visited the blonde, blue-eyed baby were amazed. They called her “Snow Baby.” More

For sixteen-year-old Eliza Brown, life seems hopelessly dreary. It’s 1903, and the turn of the century is bringing new ideas and dramatic changes. But at Stepping Stones lighthouse, the chores are endless and the company gloomy. Eliza feels isolated on the rocky island with her sullen brother Sam, her taciturn father, and her critical mother. Her happiest moments come when she travels to school on City Island by rowboat. If only she could find a way to escape her claustrophobic home. More

Susanna Hutchinson is nine years old in 1643, when her mother, Anne Hutchinson, has a vision that leads the family to settle in the wilderness where the Dutch and the Native tribes are at war. Anne Hutchinson is infamous throughout the Colonies for her religious freethinking, and her visions have brought the family in and out of trouble. More

When the American Revolution arrives in Thomas Strong’s sleepy Long Island village, his life is turned upside down. His church becomes a fort for the British, and a company of Redcoats are quartered in his family’s home. But worst of all, his father is arrested as a traitor and taken away. It’s no wonder that Thomas’s mother seems to have been affected in the head. She washes and rewashes handkerchiefs and petticoats so that her clothesline is continually full of laundry. The errands on which she sends Thomas are not only peculiar but dangerous, since they take him right past a Redcoat encampment. At first Thomas doesn’t know what to make of his mother’s behavior, but as he keeps his eyes and ears open, he begins to suspect that things are not necessarily as they seem. More

After three years at a Lowell, Massachusetts mill, sixteen-year-old Emeline McCullough can no longer stand the grueling work. But in 1865, an orphan has few choices. So when Asa Mercer announces his plan to resettle Civil War orphans and widows in the new settlement of Seattle, Washington, Emeline is one of the first to sign up. More

On a fall day in 1686, nine-year-old Daniel Bonnet’s comfortable life is shattered when the king’s soldiers destroy his family’s weaving shop and threaten to murder his father. Now, because they are Huguenots, Protestants who refuse to convert to King Louis XIV’s religion, the Bonnets must flee France. In the ensuing violence, Daniel is left permanently maimed. Wounded and in severe pain, he embarks on an uncertain and courageous journey that will last more than two years and take him to Africa and the Caribbean on a slave ship, and finally to the colony of New York. More