Valency Stirling has lived a life of submission. Controlled by a domineering mother and an over-opinionated family, she awakens on her 29th birthday resigned to dull existence. Her only escape - the Blue Castle of her imagination. But when an unexpected letter changes everything, Valency breaks the bonds of fear and finds purpose in a whole new life - a life that turns the Blue Castle of her dreams into a reality.

In the year 1912, 19-year-old Christy Huddleston leaves home to teach school in the Smoky Mountains – and comes to know and love the resilient people of the region, with their fierce pride, their dark superstitions, their terrible poverty, and their yearning for beauty and truth. But her faith will be severely challenged by trial and tragedy, by the needs and unique strengths of two remarkable young men, and by a heart torn between true love and unwavering devotion.

Jamie MacFarlane has returned a hero from the Great War but with a stubborn chest wound. The government has sent him to their new thermal springs hospital in California "where it was hoped that the brilliant sunshine, the fruits, and the clean air, the eternal summer of a beneficent land" would heal him. But nothing has worked, and with his parents now deceased and no one to care for him, it seems the next step is a camp rife with tuberculosis. Realizing this, Jamie begins his great adventure on foot toward the ocean.

The author tells the story as told to him of Anne Hobbs, a woman who went to Alaska in the 1920s to teach, but who had trouble due to her kindness to the Indians there.

Can natural enemies make peace? Actually…can they fall in love? In his classic storytelling style, New York Times bestselling author Andy Andrews delivers an adventure set sharply against the warm waters and white sands of the Gulf of Mexico in WWII America.