On a hot, humid Monday afternoon in July 1919, Maeve Curragh watches as a blimp plunges from the sky and smashes into a downtown Chicago bank building. It is the first of ten extraordinary days in Chicago history that will forever change the course of her life. Racial tensions mount as soldiers return from the battlefields of Europe and the Great Migration brings new faces to the city, culminating in violent race riots. Each day the young Irish immigrant, a catalogue order clerk for the Chicago Magic Company, devours the news of a metropolis where cultural pressures are every bit as febrile as the weather. But her interest in the headlines wanes when she catches the eye of a charming streetcar conductor. Maeve's singular voice captures the spirit of a young woman living through one of Chicago's most turbulent periods. Seamlessly blending fact with fiction, Mary Burns weaves an evocative tale of how an ordinary life can become inextricably linked with history.

Like the women of the Red Tent, even the daughter of King David lived in a world ruled by men. But this woman was born to break the rules of both men and God in order to learn the art of writing, and with it, a power that could reveal the hidden truth, or slay a man with a single word. When Janaia, eldest daughter of King David of Judah, is secretly initiated into the art and magic of writing, she finds she must master the sublime powers and visions that come with this new kind of knowledge in order to take her place in history and before God. We follow her life from the caves of Judah to the glory of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, a journey which reveals the secrets of life and death. The first Israelite woman to learn the secrets of writing, Janaia discovers through heartbreak and sacrifice that this knowledge of good and evil brings with it both frightening power and jubilant freedom from the rules of men and God.