Outcasts of Essex

Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775.

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she's the unwilling apprentice to the town's only midwife-her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father, who publishes the weekly Essex Journal.

As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial inoculation.

Sarah finds herself questioning every...