Nine-year-old Susanna Hutchison witnessed the massacre of her mother and seven siblings before being taken captive by the tribe who slaughtered her family and burned their home to the ground. Eventually, she found a place and a family in the Indian village.

When a group of Dutch discovered her years later, she begged to stay with the Indians. But they and the Dutch traded goods for the white girl, and Susanna was forced to leave the village.

Returned to Boston and to her brother, Susanna finds everything strange. Now fifteen, she is an outsider among her own people. John Winthrop and the other local authorities are watching her and her brother closely. They have determined that Susanna will conform to the strict society and not become like her outspoken, renegade mother Anne Hutchison.

Susanna is not even sure she wants acceptance back into Puritan society, where she feels like an object of pity and scorn. And she certainly does not welcome the attentions of their tall young neighbor, John Cole.

Caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, Susanna wonders how she can possibly build a new life out of the ashes of what went before.