The Blue Door

This is the last novel in Ann Rinaldi's quilt trilogy. Amanda is the main character who is living with a relative named Daphne who is addicted to opium and acts crazy as a loon. Amanda lives on a Southern plantation which has lots of black slaves.

The generational history is covered, and Amanda is being sent north to live with a very old relative who, in a previous novel, started a cotton mill. The working conditions there are better than they originally were, but they're still pretty bad.

Amanda ends up running afoul of a drunken lout of a husband who causes a riverboat to blow up, killing a number of people including his own daughter. Amanda ends up going north but is rejected by her relative's attorney who doesn't believe she is really a relative since the drunken lout stole the piece of quilt that would have proven who she was.

She ends up having to work in the mill and we get to see how hard the girls there had to work, what they did in their very limited spare time, and the half Native-American woman from the previous book, who goes now by the name of Nancy, figures prominently in the story.

So Amanda has to avoid being discovered by the slimeball, and maybe killed, has to work in the harsh mill, and seems unable to get any kind of an answer from her grandmother who might be able to get her out of the situation.

The whole trilogy is just like a really good soap opera. Nobody in it is a major historical figure, basically, but the problems that the family goes through and all the things that happen really make it a very interesting read.

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