Seven-year-old Theodora Brigid Brook is a half-Black, half-Irish girl coming of age in Manhattan's impoverished Five Points district in the mid-1800s. Though an orphan, Theo is rich with family, zigzagging between her grandmothers' tenements and her aunties' homes: from Seneca Village to the Brooklyn tobacco factories to Barnum's sensationalist museum, through the barbershops and dance halls, the taverns and the African Free School. Over the course of the novel's seven years, Theo encounters refugees fleeing Southern bondage or European destitution, migrants seeking fortune in the West and newsboys shouting the world home, camaraderie and conflict, economic depressions and momentous elections, ominous upheaval and cataclysmic draft riots and war.

As American attitudes shift - on slavery, on race, on women, on class, on colonialism and indigeneity - these national growing pains are seen through the curious, yearning, buoyant eyes of young Theo. Corthron's Moon and the Mars guides the reader through a time of a country divided, when a national reckoning was taking place, one that will resonate with readers today.