Bøker av Karen Dean Benson

In the spring of 1836, eighteen-year-old Chenoa Sandoval escapes the suffocating Mt. Saint Dominic Convent in Boston and sails around the tip of South America to the wild land of her birth, Carmel, Alta California. Chenoa is determined to honor the memory of Padre Tomas, Mission San Carlos Borromeo's last executor, who was also her adopted father. She will teach the Indian children born the years she was in the convent. Only her guardian, Don Sebastian Viandante, stands in her way.

Pilfering food for her sickly máthair, Aisling O'Quinn wanders amidst the filth-ridden cobbled streets of Five Points, Manhattan. A matron of the Children's Aid Society catches her and considers it her civic duty to force the twelve-year-old onto an orphan train to a "better life". Though Five Points is a notorious slum, with its rag-picker alleys and bandit haunts, Aisling desperately misses her beloved parent and their shabby room at the bend on Mulberry Street. In 1863, after four years of misery on a foster farm in Pennsylvania and as troops from the North and the South converge for the Battle of Gettysburg, Aisling finally musters the courage to escape. Not even the crippling fear of capture as a runaway fades her intense longing to reunite with her parent. At sixteen, she digs deep within herself for the courage, faith, and determination that will guide her safely back to the circle of her máthair's love.

In the spring of 1788, Renn Arelia Sheridan stares up at a portrait of the First Duchess of Chippenham, and the painting clearly shows an emerald brooch on her gown. Renn Arelia's hand slips into her pocket fingering the brooch her deceased mother gave her. Her nape prickles with caution. This piece is what they sought when they ransacked her parent's manor and forced her to London, betrothing her to marry a French Marques. The proverbial straw, the significance of her mother's locket, embroils Renn Arelia. She escapes the ancestral estate, hoping the heirloom is a blessing and not a curse. Her quest is a teaching position at an orphanage in Gravesend. Spiraling from one disaster to the next, she deceitfully gains passage aboard a ship and tumbles into the circle of a devil captain, forever changing the course of her life. She has no idea the locket will define her as though it is a certificate of birth.