Thirteen-year-old Ratchet spends a summer in Maine with her eccentric great-aunts Tilly and Penpen, hearing strange stories from the past and encountering a variety of unusual and colorful characters.

Nine-year-old Josefina, the youngest of four sisters living in New Mexico in 1824, tries to help run the household after her mother dies.

Seventeen-year-old Pattyn, the eldest daughter in a large Mormon family, is sent to her aunt's Nevada ranch for the summer, where she temporarily escapes her alcoholic, abusive father and finds love and acceptance, only to lose everything when she returns home.

Gr 3-5--As hard as it must be to write a sequel or prequel to one's own book, it must be doubly difficult to write a new story using someone else's creations, especially such well-known characters as the March girls. Pfeffer offers a slight story that takes place before Alcott's book; it's set when the girls are younger (Jo is 10), before the war and Pa's absence from home. The family members seem familiar, but the language of the story is simplified....