Twelve-year-old Della Kelly of Maryville, North Carolina, tries to come to terms with her mother's mental illness while her father struggles to save the farm from a record-breaking drought.

Because living with "modern-hippy" parents on a goat farm means fourteen-year-old Janie Gorman cannot have a normal high school life, she tries joining Jam Band, making friends with Monster, and spending time with elderly former civil rights workers.

This stunning novel is set near the end of the Civil War in the mountainous farm country of North Carolina bordering on the Hiwassee Rivera region where neighbor turned on neighbor and helpless families were preyed on by deserters from both armies and by violent gangs pretending to be military units. Madison Curtis and his wife Sarah live on a plantation that lies in the path of a gang of Union partisans, led by a vicious bushwhacker named Bridgeman....

In 1831 in rural North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Martitia, newly orphaned and timid, comes to live with a large, boisterous Quaker familywhose five sons delight in teasing and laughter.