In 1859, eleven-year-old Elijah Freeman, the first free-born child in Buxton, Canada, which is a haven for slaves fleeing the American south, uses his wits and skills to try to bring to justice the lying preacher who has stolen money that was to be used to buy a family's freedom.

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

A slave family is distressed when they discover their son Ben has run away.

When Nic, a slave in the mines outside of Rome, is forced to enter a sealed cavern containing lost treasures of Julius Caesar, he finds himself in possession of an ancient amulet filled with magic once reserved for the Gods, and becomes the center of a conspiracy to overthrow the emperor and destroy Rome.

After a fellow slave is beaten to death, Sadie and her family flee the plantation for freedom through the Underground Railroad.

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

In the Vermont spring of 1853, Bell's Star, a Morgan horse, and his owner Katie rescue a runaway slave and try to outwit the slave catchers in order to help her to freedom.

In 1890s West Africa, when a brutal raid leaves their home in ruins, twin sisters Hassana and Husseina are kidnapped, sold into slavery, and separated, remaining connected through shared dreams of water, but will their fates ever draw them back together?

In eighteenth-century West Africa, a boy raised by his blacksmith father and the Mother Elements--Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth--is captured and taken to America as a slave.

In 1859 twelve-year-old Clotee, a house slave who must conceal the fact that she can read and write, records in her diary her experiences and her struggle to decide whether to escape to freedom.