This lyrical middle grade historical novel set during the Great Depression from award-winning author L. M. Elliott is a moving tale of the spirit of American persistence, found family, and the magical partnership between girl and horse. Bea wakes to Daddy's note in a hayloft, where he abandoned her with her little sister after the stock market crash took everything: Daddy's job at the bank, their home, Mama's health and life. How is Bea supposed to convince the imposing Mrs. Scott to take in two stray children? Mrs. Scott's money and Virginia farm are drying up in a drought and the Great Depression, too. She might have to sell her beautiful horses, starting with a dangerous chestnut that has caused tragedy in the past and injures her stableman shortly after Bea arrives. But wrestling with her own hurts and fears, Bea understands the chestnut's skittish distrust. She sees hope in the powerful jumper--if he can compete at horse shows, they might save the farm, and maybe Bea can even win a place in Mrs. Scott's heart.

In 1941, after Hitler declares war on the United States, unleashing U-boat submarines to attack American ships, Louisa June, with the waves outside her house carrying dangerous enemies, must help her mother after her father and brother are caught in the crossfire.

When nineteen-year-old fighter pilot Henry Forester comes home from France in 1945 after enduring capture, torture, and a dangerous escape from the Gestapo, he realizes that he will not be able to fully heal until he returns to a war-ravaged France to find the young boy who helped him survive.

Drew is an army brat, a hotshot athlete poised to be his high school's star pitcher, when he has to move for the sixth time in fifteen years -- this time to West Berlin, where American soldiers like his dad hold an outpost of democracy against communist Russia in Hitler's former capital. Meanwhile, in East Berlin, his cousin Matthias has grown up in the wreckage left by Allied bombing during World War II, on streets ruled by the Communist Party's secret police. From the opposing sides of the Cold War, Drew and Matthias begin to overcome the many ideological walls between them to become wary friends. They argue over the space race, capitalism, socialism, and even the American civil rights movement, and bond over rock 'n' roll -- music outlawed in Matthias's part of the city. If Matthias is caught by the Stasi's neighbourhood spies with the records or books Drew has given him, he will be sent to a work camp for 're-education'. At the same time, Drew's friendship with the East Berlin Jugend -- who ardently spout communist dogma -- raises suspicions about his family's loyalty to America. As the political situation around them gets all the more dire, Drew and Matthias's loyalty -- to their sector, their countries, their families, and each other -- will be tested in ways that will change their lives forever. Set in the tumultuous year leading up to the surprise overnight raising of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and punctuated with real-life photographs, headlines, and personalities of the time, Walls brings to vivid life the heroic and tragic choices of the Cold War.