Sixth-graders Sara, a Pakistani American, and Elizabeth, a Jewish girl, connect in an after school cooking club and bond over food and their mothers' struggles to become United States citizens.
Fourteen-year-old Polly Rodgers keeps a diary of her 1873 journey from England to Minnesota as part of a colony of eighty people seeking religious freedom, and of their first year struggling to make a life there, led by her father, a Baptist minister.
