When eleven-year-old Maiju arrived with her parents at Yankee Mills, Minnesota State, America, she was filled with excitement. The long voyage from Finland was over; her Uncle Olavi and Aunt Marta were there to greet them, and when Maiju closed her eyes the smell of pine and pitch and spring sap reminded her of home. But in 1876 Yankee Mills was only a few houses huddled on a muddy, crooked street stacked with lumber and piles of logs. With all their belongings piled precariously on a wagon drawn by oxen, the settlers had to travel miles through swamp and forest before they found the land they wanted to claim for their own. Only after months of brutally hard work were the precious sauna and the house completed. Then Maiju's father lost their entire crop in a sudden hailstorm and had to leave her and her mother while he worked in the town to pay back his debts. Through the lonely, fierce Minnesota winter Maiju and her mother waited patiently for Christmas, for his visit—but when her father left after the holiday he never returned. Maiju found that in her anger and her grief, the loyalty and honesty of her friends and her mother's love and compassion gave her Finn sisu—courage—which helped her face the future. Ann Nolan Clark sympathetically portrays the warmth, loyalty and courage of the first Finnish immigrants, and recreates the magnificent and austere forests and lakes of Minnesota where they settled a century ago.