Four sisters, two wars, one epidemic, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression. The sisters experience the global events of their day from the sinking of the Titanic, World War I and the devastating Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, social upheaval of the Roaring Twenties, the Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the migration west to California, to terror on the west coast following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately World War II San Francisco. They are the granddaughters of first settlers of the Missouri wilderness. Myrtha's eldest sister is a practical and outgoing business woman, next is the beautiful and selfish farm wife, and the youngest is red-haired and impetuous, with the courage to leave her husband to follow a dream that will take her west and eventually to the booming 1920s cities of Singapore and Shanghai. After a humiliating first love, Myrtha is sent away while she finishes her final year of school. There she discovers an unusual gift that frightens her. Returning home to face the man she loved as well as his wife and child, she marries an older man. After three children and trapped in a loveless marriage she plots her escape only to have her carefully hoarded funds wiped out by a run on the bank after the Crash of 1929. She finds solace with a family friend that results in devastating scandal, but survives that and the Great Depression as the family migrates on west to California, first to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and then San Francisco at the time of the 1939 World's Fair. With the death of her husband in the beginning days of World War II and left to raise a teenage daughter alone she finds strength and peace in herself.