Thirteen-year-old Tameisha is tired. Tired of teachers, tired of homework, generally tired of school. All she really wants to do (apart from hanging out with her friends) is to style hair. All that all changes when a cosmetologist inspires her to make an unprecedented visit to the school library to research Madame C. J. Walker. In the library, something goes terribly wrong and Tameisha finds herself, still in Barbados, but in 1840, just post-emancipation. Although slavery has ended, the plight of Black people remains dire and Tameisha is under constant threat of being sent to work in the elds of a plantation.

Initially, Tameisha is shielded from danger by the kindness of some of the people she encounters (including a few influential historical figures) and the education she has despised up until then, but that may not be enough to save her from the back-breaking eld work most Black Barbadians are still required to do in 1840.

Will she find her way back to twenty- first century Barbados or will she have to stay in the nineteenth century and accept her awful fate?