How to find your way in the dark

In 1938, after the apparently intentional murder of his father, the now-orphaned twelve-year-old Sheldon vows revenge. The fire of his need to get whoever it was who killed his father takes him to Hartford, where he grows up under the buttoned-up watch of Uncle Nate together with his teenage cousins Mirabelle and Abe. World War II takes center stage in everyone's lives soon, and Sheldon, still seeking vengeance, comes to learn that life is largely composed of crimes, whether wrongly or rightly committed.