Examines life for girls and women in America in 1904 .

It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. All the other kids picked countries like France or Germany, but when Caitlin saw Zimbabwe written on the board, it sounded like the most exotic place she had ever heard of -- so she chose it. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen pal letter. There were only ten letters, and forty kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got...

The diary of Sarah Nita, a thirteen-year old Navajo girl, which describes the Navajos' forced 400-mile walk from their ancestral homeland to Fort Sumner in 1864.

Three years after being kidnapped as a "live specimen" in a cruel experiment to determine the cause of her deafness, Mary Lambert has a grown weary of domestic life on Martha's Vineyard, and even of her once-beloved writing. So when an old acquaintance summons her to an isolated manor house outside Boston to teach a young deaf girl to communicate, Mary agrees. But can a child of eight with no prior language be taught? And is Mary up to the task?...