"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...

When it burst onto the literary scene in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin galvanized anti-slavery sentiment in America. So much so that when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he half-jokingly said that she instigated the Civil War. Few books, if any, have been as widely circulated as Unlce Tom's Cabin was when it was first published. And over 100 years later, it remains controversial ... The book engages readers with the compelling adventures of...