In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.

Twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon, still dealing with the loss of her mother and baby sister two years earlier, and her grieving father's sudden decision to move to an isolated New England farmhouse, takes further steps into the adult world when she and her dad find an abandoned newborn clinging to life in the woods near their home, and later come to know the young mother and learn her story.

Preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy decides it is time to add some excitement to her life and meet someone her own age, so she answers a personal ad, but when she meets her Mr. Right, he turns out to be the last person she expected.

Story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America struggling to recognize her own reality.

Presents eight short stories revolving around young African-Americans, from little girls in a Brownie troop to a young man who accompanies his father to the Million Man March.

Latina novelist Alma Huebner begs off joining her husband on a humanitarian mission to the Dominican Republic to work on her next book, and finds herself becoming obsessed with the life of her subject--a woman who hand-picked a group of orphan boys to serve as live carriers of the small pox virus in order to provide Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis a ready supply of vaccine with which to inoculate the populations of Spain's American colonies in 1803....