Peer Gynt

In the fall of 1994, a teacher at Chicago's run-down Steinmetz High conspires with the school's academic decathlon team to cheat on an academic competition.

Mahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.

Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, where she is treated poorly by most except her cousin Edmund. Her life is complicated by the arrival of the worldly Mary and Henry Crawford