Nine-year-old Eva Hoffman is the daughter of Austrian than Jewish refugees who have found a precarious safety among a small community of European exiles attached to a psychoanalytic hospital in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1951, and the landmark school desegregation case, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, is being tried in the local court As the rising river inundates the town, the Hoffmans open their home to refugees from the flood, and Eva learns the complexities of prejudice -- and courage -- both within and outside her family.