During the off season, Sylvia Bergstrom Compson and some of her Elm Creek quilt camp staffers find a small stack of letters stuck in the locked drawer of an old desk. The letters date to the late 1800s and appear to be related to the story brought forth in "The Runaway Quilt," which revealed that a slave named Joanna was once harbored at the Bergstrom estate, just before the Civil War erupted. Sylvia would love to investigate the history behind the letters, but she feels that she's not a good enough researcher. And Summer Sullivan isn't around to help with the project. She's off in Chicago, going to grad school.

In the meantime, we readers are magically transported to 1859, and the day when Joanna is recaptured by slavers and is marched back on foot from Pennsylvania to Virginia. From that point on, the stage is all hers. What we learned in the previous book was merely a vignette, a tiny portion of Joanna's life story. Here, we're exposed to it all. We follow her back to the plantation she came from. We find out how and why Joanna began to quilt herself. We experience her days, both before and after her journey to central Pennsylvania. It's easy for us to like Joanna and champion her cause; and it's easy to want only good things to happen to her. But here it is her fate to be a slave in Virginia and then later, in South Carolina. Imagine facing such difficult times that you can find comfort only in a colleague's basic advice to just "Keep breathin'." Yikes.

As with any slave narrative, even a fictitious one, some of the scenes are heart-breaking at the very least and utterly reprehensible at the most. And yet, we need to be reminded of that part of our American past. We also need to make an international jump and acknowledge that somewhere else on the planet right now, other folks (both men and women) are being treated as inhumanely as African Americans were in the Confederate South in the mid-1800s. It's an unfortunate fact that cannot help but crop up in the back of the readers' minds, while their fingers continue to turn these pages.

Will Summer Sullivan be able to present Sylvia with ANY of Joanna's history merely through official documentation? Or will we readers now know more than Sylvia and the Elm Creek characters themselves ever will? That possibility in and of itself makes for an interesting dilemma.

Fans may want to back up and first re-read "The Runaway Quilt" so that the details are fresh in their minds for this continuation of the story. And yet, "The Lost Quilter" is a powerful, stand-alone read in its own right. Ms. Chiaverini has woven a fabric of historical fiction that is as compelling as any offered to us by veteran storyteller John Jakes.

To diehard readers who may yearn for an Elm Creek book that concentrates on the familiar, contemporary characters; and to those who may ask, "What does history have to do with quilts, anyway?" one can only say, Read the book. Read the book, and you will know why this story is an important one.