Twelve-year-old Amber Billows, upset to be moving once again to follow her father's reporting job, cannot help loving Hawaii, but the peace of her tropical paradise is shattered on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.

In the diary account of her journey from Ireland in 1847 and of her work in a mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Mary reveals a great longing for her family.