John Moss has published books on a number of subjects, including murder, Ireland and the Canadian Arctic. He has been a literature professor, an endurance athlete (Boston Marathon, eleven times; the Ironman in Hawaii, once) and a scuba diving instructor. He has kept bees and swans, and raised horses and dogs. He and his wife, Beverley Haun, have travelled to over seventy countries. They are restoring a stone farmhouse in Peterborough, Ontario, which is older than both of them put together.

Allison Briscoe is your average fifteen-year-old-until someone tries to kill her. Shot in the head, her doctors and family think she is in a coma, but in fact, though she cannot move, she can think, she can hear, and she can dream.

Each night, Allison lives vicariously through her pioneer ancestors, experiencing their adventures through their eyes. First, she enters the world of Rebecca Haun, a fifteen-year-old rebel who lived in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War. To prove a friend innocent of murder, Rebecca betrays her Mennonite beliefs and joins the Women's Brigade with George Washington's rag-tag army at Valley Forge.

And each day, Allison struggles to find a way to show her family that she is awake-a goal that becomes increasingly desperate when she realizes that whoever shot her has come back to finish the job.