This is the story of Lizzy, a 13-year-old girl who, with her parents and others, has been traveling the Sante Fe Trail. Her mother dies and later, when she and her father arrive in Santa Fe, she is left at a Catholic girl's school, her father not telling her beforehand that she would be left there. She is a Methodist.
As a Methodist she doesn't see things the same way that a Catholic does, and she doesn't like the emphasis on suffering and blood that she sees around her. She befriends an older woman and, at first, seems to get on fairly well with the other girls, but things go very bad fairly soon.
A lot of this involves a traveling poor carpenter that she meets. The church needs a staircase since the men who originally built the church didn't have enough architectural sense to connect the floor of the church with a higher area for the choir. The other girls expect a miracle from St. Joseph, so they go on a hunger strike to get the carpenter kicked out. A variety of other things go wrong and soon Lizzy is an outcast from the other girls.
A lot of other things go on including a kitten that is blinded, a vicious man who comes close to killing Lizzy and her roommate, and the completion of the staircase and disappearance of the carpenter.
The story is one of Ann Rinaldi's best ones.
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