Come a Stranger is one of several novels by Voigt set in Crisfield, Maryland, a small town located on the eastern shores of Chesapeake Bay. The time is the latter half of the 1970s. Mina lives in a closely knit, predominantly black neighborhood where her father is pastor of a church. They are a large family of six children, although Eleanor is married and Charles Stuart is away at college. The story takes Mina from age ten through age fifteen, through fifth grade in her neighborhood elementary school, where black children are in the majority, to high school where Mina becomes one of the minority. Her mother points out to her that in terms of power, her role as a woman makes Mina a member of a second minority.

Mina vows that neither being black nor being a woman shall stand in the way of her being her...