"Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the FWP to write the first official account of Macedonian History. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture...

River Starling, adopted under mysterious circumstances, has lived most of her eleven years on her grandparents' Pennsylvania farm but after Gran suddenly decides they must move to Birdsong, West Virginia, River finds an unlikely new friend, learns about God's love, and begins to feel at home.

"In the poverty of the Appalachian coal country in 1908, eight-year-old Minna's life gets even more difficult after her father dies of black lung, and that winter she cannot go to school because she does not have a coat--until the quilting mothers make her a coat using pieces of cloth from their own lives, each with a special story behind it" --