While spending the winter of 1947-1948 in Miami Beach with her family, ten-year-old Sally makes up stories, casts herself in starring roles in movies, and encounters a sinister stranger.

The land was theirs, but so were its hardships. Ten-year-old Birdie Boyer can hardly wait to start picking strawberries. But her family has just moved to the Florida backwoods, and they haven't even begun their planting. Making the new farm prosper is not easy. There is heat to suffer through, and droughts, and cold snaps. And, perhaps most worrisome of all for the Boyers, there are rowdy neighbors, just itching to start a feud.

"For Carrie and her best friend, Zora, Eatonville--America's first incorporated Black township--has been an idyllic place to live out their childhoods. But when a lynch mob crosses the town's border to pursue a fugitive and a grave robbery resuscitates the ugly sins of the past, the safe ground beneath them seems to shift. Not only has Zora's own father--the showboating preacher John Hurston--decided to run against the town's trusted mayor, but there...

In 1949 in the Florida Everglades, a ten-year-old girl called Bones, whose father is part Miccosukee Indian, tries to discover what really happened when he is accused of two murders and sent to jail.