After her mother's death, Rose goes to live with a grandmother she doesn't know. She finds solace in her grandmother's greenhouse, but when she investigates a strange glowing light, she finds herself transported 100 years into the past.

In her fictionalized journal, eleven-year-old Minnie Swift recounts how her family dealt with the difficult times during the Depression and how the arrival of an orphan from Texas changed their lives in Indianapolis just before Christmas 1932.

Growing up in 1943 war-torn England, thirteen-year-old Alice and her older sister Louise are members of a centuries-old spy clan, but when Louise decides to spy for the enemy, their bond is changed forever.