Edward and Nathan, two Navajo stepbrothers, work with a young water monster named Dew to confront their past and save the world from a monstrous, enormous Enemy that is stealing water from all of the Navajo Nation.

In September 1944, eleven-year-old Billie lives with her great aunt, Doff, eagerly waiting for her older brother Leo to return from boot camp, and desperate to find the father that left when she was little; but Leo brings a friend with him, a Navajo named Denny, and the injured dog they have rescued and named Bear--and when the two young men go off to war, Bear becomes the thread that ties them all together, and helps Billie to find a true friend....

A Navaho family welcomes a new baby into the family with love and ceremony, eagerly waiting for that first special laugh. Includes brief description of birth customs in different cultures.

"Yossel, along with his family, flees anti-Jewish Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century and settles in the American Southwest where he forges a friendship with Thomas, a Native American Navajo boy"--

After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.