When Josie goes to stay with her cousin Edith, she's glad to be starting a new life away from the shame that has haunted her family since her brother decided not to fight in the war, but Josie suddenly faces a dilemma when Edith and her friends start teasing a timid classmate.

In England in 1662, a time of religious persecution, fifteen-year-old Susanna, a poor country girl and a Quaker, and seventeen-year-old William, a wealthy Anglican, meet and fall in love against all odds.

Maroo, a girl of the late Ice Age, must take charge after her father is killed, and lead her little brother, mother, and aged grandmother to the safety of the winter camp before the first blizzards strike.