This heart-warming story is about Bella, a 13-year-old girl in Tampa, Florida, in the 1930s. Her grandfather is a "lector" at a cigar factory, which means he reads fiction, newspapers, and union news to the workers as they roll cigars. Being a "lector" is an important role in their Cuban American immigrant community. But the hard times of the Depression mean that Bella must go to work in the factory. Her hope of getting the education a "lector" needs seems impossible.

A portrait of the Finnish immigrant experience in Minnesota during the early twentieth century-now in paperback After journeying across the Atlantic with his mother and two sisters, young Otto Peltonen joins his father in the iron ore mines of northern Minnesota, experiencing the harsh labor conditions that were common at the time, as mining companies cared more about making a profit than for their workers' safety. Writing in his journal about his family's struggles and the hard life Finnish immigrants endured in the early twentieth century, Otto ultimately strengthens his resolve to find the freedom his family had first sought in America.