This is his­tor­i­cal fic­tion about a fas­ci­nat­ing top­ic not cov­ered before in many young adult nov­els; the con­ver­sos of New Mex­i­co. Many Jews who were expelled from Spain dur­ing the peri­od of the Inqui­si­tion made their way to Mex­i­co and from there to the south­west­ern Unit­ed States, tak­ing their cus­toms with them. This is the group we are intro­duced to. The sto­ry is told through the eyes of 18-year-old Samuel Rabi­nowitz, who has come to Amer­i­ca from a Russ­ian shtetl to escape the pogroms and to pave the way for his fam­i­ly. It is the 1880’s; and he is met at Cas­tle Gar­den in New York for immi­gra­tion assis­tance by Emma Lazarus, who works for the Hebrew Imi­gra­tion Aid Soci­ety. After some time spent as a ped­dler on the Low­er East Side, Samuel is encour­aged to go out west to attempt to earn a real liv­ing. His reli­gious faith and obser­vance are of course chal­lenged along the way. We fol­low him on his jour­ney through Philadel­phia, Pitts­burgh, Chica­go, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Col­orado, until his arrival in New Mex­i­co. The por­traits of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties along the way are well-devel­oped, as are his inter­ac­tions with the peo­ple he meets. He is a hard work­er who is com­mit­ted to sav­ing mon­ey and send­ing home as much as pos­si­ble. At the same time he meets with many obsta­cles, both in busi­ness, by being cheat­ed, and per­son­al ones of rela­tion­ships and inter­mar­riage. This is not only the saga of one young man and his fam­i­ly and the secret Jews he meets in the South­west, but also the telling of the sto­ry of the lives of thou­sands of immi­grants to Amer­i­ca who had to over­come seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble odds to cre­ate the Amer­i­can dream and to live the Jew­ish faith. Anti-Semi­tism is anoth­er chal­lenge our pro­tag­o­nist has to face. The author at times tends to be didac­tic and to pro­vide an over­whelm­ing amount of back­ground infor­ma­tion. He clear­ly does this to be sure that the read­er under­stands the Jew­ish his­to­ry. For ages 10 – 13.