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In 1890, Emily Ayers, an illiterate eighteen-year-old, is living on the edge of the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey. She goes to a nearby town to care for the sick wife and three children of the Reverend Josiah Fairchild, a distant relative. When his wife, Retty dies, the Reverend marries Emily. As the wife of a prominent minister, Emily is faced with many challenges: coping with the disapproval of some of the church congregation; learning to be a wife and a stepmother to rebellious Jack and shy Noah; and finding a way to learn to read. She is shamed by her father’s outrageous behavior that includes getting drunk and causing a disastrous fire, and worried about her mother alone back on the farm. With her friend Sarah she joins the exciting new Suffragist movement, and when Sarah’s brother Charles moves back to town, Emily’s life takes on a new direction.

Although theories of exploitation and subversion have radically changed our understanding of gender in Renaissance literature, to favour only those theories is to risk ignoring productive exchanges between 'masculine' and 'feminine' in Renaissance culture. 'Appropriation' is too simple a term to describe these exchanges - as when Petrarchan lovers flirt dangerously with potentially destructive femininity. Spenser revises this Petrarchan phenomenon, constructing flirtations whose participants are figures of speech, readers or narrative voices. His plots allow such exchanges to occur only through conditional speech, but this very conditionality powerfully shapes his work. Seventeenth-century works - including a comedy by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell - suggest that the civil war and the upsurge of female writers necessitated a reformulation of conditional erotics.

In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she envisioned a safe, conventional life ahead. She never imagined living in Kenya toward the end of the Mau Mau uprising, plunged into an exotic new world, facing safari ants, wild bees, and a vicious monkey, and discovering a core of strength deep in her security-loving soul. See Kenya through her eyes in its last tumultuous days as a British colony and witness the transformative effect on her life. Meet the emerging young leaders of the independence movement and the fascinating women who became her friends. Travel to Murchison Falls in Uganda and to Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika. Accompany her, with her house servant and three young children, on a three-hundred-mile drive to the Kenya coast through desolate bush inhabited by big game, a trip that had a profound and lasting impact.

Thirteen-year-old Anna's passionate dream is to go to high school, the first girl from her tiny farm community back in 1910 to do so. She is determined not to stay at home like her older sister, Mary Ellen, helping their mother and waiting to marry a local farmer. But there is no money to send her to River Heights, seven miles away, and anyway, her mother needs her. When sixteen-year-old Mary Ellen is sexually assaulted by a local boy, the situation gets worse. No one suspects Mary Ellen is pregnant until she gives birth to the illegitimate baby. The surprise birth threatens to ruin the family's standing in the community and Mary Ellen's reputation. Anna wrestles with helping her parents and sister while still striving to make her burning desire to go to high school a reality. Meanwhile she becomes involved in solving the mystery of a missing ring, and in stopping another attack by the boy who assaulted her sister. But how will that help her realize her dream?

Marie and her mother, Allie, who was pregnant with Rose, were deserted by Marie's father when Marie was two years old. Allie was left with no food or money to pay bills, so she had to write to her papa, Cassie, for help. He went to Ada, Oklahoma, and took them back to Twin Acres, a 600-acre farm in Arkansas. The farm was so named because it was owned by Cassie and his twin brother, Willie. It was a successful farm and a wonderful place to grow up. Then came the Crash of '29 - there was no money, but there was food and a place to live. Still struggling with the Great Depression, our country entered WWII. The Army decided Twin Acres was to be a chicken farm to help feel soldiers at a nearby base. Eventually they also claimed Mal, Marie's new husband, and sent him to North Africa as a medic, where he was captured by the Germans. Mal Jr. grew up to follow Grandfather Cassie's footsteps on the farm, as did his son. Twin Acres flourished with each generation, but when Marie and her sister, Rosie, were both widowed they made some drastic life changes.

When the "greatest generation" came home from World War II, many of the men returned to college on the GI Bill, a saga that has been the subject of numerous books and movies. But the story of their wives, also part of that greatest generation, has seldom been told. Kate McIntosh, the young mother of a toddler and a newborn, struggles with the challenges of being isolated in barracks-like World War II housing in Willow Run Village, with no car, little money, and a mostly absent husband., Mark, her husband, attends classes at the university during the day and works on the assembly line at the nearby auto plant at night. He is rarely home. When she and Mark meet with other graduate students, Kate feels awkward and excluded, with nothing to talk about but diapers and pureed carrots. Kate is determined to find ways to reach beyond the confines of her life. She befriends her rural Tennessee neighbors, teaching the illiterate mother and son to read; gets involved in the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign; creates a garden in the weedy field behind their building; and finds new strength and talents she didn't know she had. At the same time, she attempts to quell her rising anxiety about what might be going on between Mark and a fellow graduate student, Amanda. Things come to a head when Mark is seriously injured in an accident and Kate has new challenges to face.