Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775.

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she's the unwilling apprentice to the town's only midwife—her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father, who publishes the weekly Essex Journal.

As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial inoculation.

Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father's judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it's considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper.

When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath.