So many readers have written and asked: What happened to Sarny, the young slave girl who learned to read in Nightjohn? Extraordinary things happened to her, from the moment she fled the plantation in the last days of the Civil War, suddenly a free woman in search of her sold-away

children, until she found them and began a new life. Sarny’s story gives a panoramic view of America in a time of trial, tragedy, and hoped-for change, until her last days in the 1930s.

"A satisfying sequel … It is a great read, with characters both to hate and to cherish, and a rich sense of what it really was like then."—Booklist, starred review