colorful characters, Ned Tillman conjures up five generations of his family in an engaging look at how they might have dealt with the critical social, economic, and political issues of their time.

The book, centered on the 300-year-old Good Endeavor homestead (where the author grew up) incorporates a slew of family stories, unusual family traits, and artifacts passed down through time.

The protagonist discovers artifacts which inflames a desire to know more about this past. The book takes the reader through the lives, the loves, and the losses of five generations and brings the reader right up to the present day. Along the way the family members encounter vigilante justice, piracy, bounty hunters, abolitionists, suffragettes, land conservationists, barnstorming, union strikes, integration, and war and climate protests.

The novel humanizes our collective ancestors and brings their stories, our touchstones to the past, to life. These examples of their lives throughout the great American experiment might help us all find our better selves in the struggles we face in the twenty-first century.