A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and to the hazards of a new life.

Eleven-year-old Sophia endeavors to prevent her increasingly forgetful eighty-eight-year-old neighbor and best friend Sophie from entering assisted living, and in the process, uncovers unexpected stories of war, loss, and hope.

Orphan teenage brothers, Carl and Adam, are in Portland, Oregon and when the police accuse Adam of stealing jewelry, it's up to the younger brother Carl to find the real thief in the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant state of 1922.