Nine-year-old cousins Rosie, Lily, and Tess make a neighborhood newspaper celebrating all their friends on Cobble Street.

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

Julia Wortham, counting herself blessed to have been given a farm on which to live with her husband Samuel and two children during the Great Depression, finds her faith tested when her brother-in-law, just out of prison, shows up at their home with a child he claims was fathered by Samuel.

The Worthams and Hammonds are as close as two families could be, sharing almost everything on their Depression-era Illinois farms. So when a raging fire breaks out and threatens to destroy the Hammond farm, both families are affected by the tragedy. But how did the fire start? Several of the kids know the truth, but no one is talking. As the families try to overcome aching loss, misplaced blame, troubled relationships, and an upsetting secret, they...

Flora, Ruby, Olivia, and Nikki are excited that their new neighbors have a daughter named Willow, but the new girl does not seem open to the idea of friendship.