It is 1975. Boston is mired in the chaos of court-ordered forced busing. Protest marches course through the streets daily. Children attend schools teeming with armed riot police. Angry mobs heckle students as they step off school buses. Snipers are staked out on school rooftops.

This is daily life for the young people of Boston. A cautious attempt by Katie Flannery from Charlestown to start a dialogue with Jack Sinclair from Roxbury ignites already inflamed racial tensions and sets off a sequence of events that will change both their lives forever.

This story will take you from the explosively integrated school hallways to the bloody street battles with police, from the drug dens of Roxbury to the stately homes surrounding Charlestown's soaring Bunker Hill monument. It will bring you back to the roiling anger and moral ambiguity that rocked Boston and the country during the tumult of the forced busing era. And it will deliver you intimately into the lives of these two families struggling desperately to survive it all.