In this companion volume to Useful Toil, John Burnett has drawn extensively on over eight hundred previously unpublished manuscripts. The result is a unique record of childhood that reveals in intimate detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of nineteenth-century working-class life. Besides affording rare insights into the developing child's world of dreams, hopes and fears, they reflect a crucial period in the evolution of a family tradition; a time when, to counteract the brutalizing pressures of urbanization and industrialization, ordinary people turned to each other for support. Children have seldom had a voice in history: these writers and their experiences take their place as part of the essential fabric of our past.

Mid-19th century: The Civil War is raging, as is racial tension. Abby is the young, recently widowed wife of a Northern Civil War surgeon, who encounters many wealthy and unscrupulous men as she mourns the death of her husband. Her adopted son, Michael, falls in love with a former slave, Manda. They want to escape to a place where the social climate is different, away from prying eyes that judge and condemn. Michael and Manda travel by railroad from New York to California, where Manda would be recognized as Michael's common-law wife. They hope to begin a new life and start a vineyard. But fate deals them a different hand when Manda is abducted, first by Mormons, then soldiers, and later by a Chinese group in San Francisco involved in enslaving young women and sending them as concubines to Asia. Abby, Michael, and an older former slave, Betty, band together to bring Manda back. Each will have to make a sacrifice and each will be forever changed by a series of events that takes them places they never expected. Joel Berman writes a thrilling saga set against the backdrop of historical events: the atrocities of the Civil War, medicine in the mid-19th century, emancipation, the suffrage movement, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the conversion from sailing ships to steam ships, and the influx of the opium trade into the United States.

Set in the 1990’s the novel explores how fate can destroy the destiny of dreams. Human tragedies are everyday occurrences and how these are dealt with depends upon factors such as religious beliefs, current responsibilities, support from family and friends and maturity. Jo and Kate are verging on adolescence when tragedy robs them of family and friends. They believe that the only way they can put the past behind them is by running away from it.