Overview
After twelve-year-old Naomi loses her parents in a fire and learns of her aunt’s plan to send her to work in a mill, she and her siblings seek refuge in a Shaker village. Because Naomi has some knowledge of herbs and doctoring from her mother, the Shakers assign her to an apprenticeship with the village herbalist in order to develop her skills as a healer. As Naomi matures, she senses that something big is missing in her life, but she doesn’t know what it is. At sixteen she leaves the Shakers to go out into the world. Eventually she establishes a career as an herbalist within a community that offers comfort and security. But that, too, fails to satisfy her growing need for something more. When she meets Joseph Fairbanks, she thinks that perhaps she has found what she was seeking.
While searching for her true self and for the way to meet the needs of her personal sense of spirituality, an orphaned teenaged girl joins a Shaker community in mid-nineteenth century New England and learns about a new religion called Mormonism.