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After losing both parents, 10-year-old Betsy Johnson and her younger brother, Tad, have been sent to live in the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, in late 1834. They hardly know their only relatives, Aunt Emma and Uncle Michael, who had given up all their worldly possessions five years earlier to live communally with 500 other Believers.
Betsy has been frightened by the stories her preacher, Rev. Simpson, has told about the Shakers. He says they are possessed by the devil, speak in tongues and twirl themselves into a frenzy as part of their worship. Is this any place she wants to grow up?
Betsy feels responsible for maintaining the memory of her parents and caring for her brother. Stripped of nearly everything familiar, she also feels terribly alone, but that loneliness fades with time as Betsy is befriended by an artistic girl named Grace, whose wagging tongue fills her in on the gossip about the Sisters and Brethren at Pleasant Hill, as well as the duties of children in the society. Betsy especially loves time spent in the garden. It reminds her of home - and her ma, who had grown herbs and used them to treat ailing neighbors.
Betsy also seals an uneasy relationship with an older girl, Ruth, whom Betsy rescues from certain death after Ruth plunges through the ice during a late winter outing. Once safely in the infirmary, Ruth doesn't respond to treatment, so Betsy wrestles with whether she should divulge Ruth's secret in order to save the girl's life.
Betsy begins to realize her own healing gifts, but will she accept Pleasant Hill as her new home and the Shakers as her new family?
This work of historical fiction for young readers is the first in a three-part series published within the "Think Young Collection," a division of MotesBooks. (www.MotesBooks.com)
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