All summer long, Emily Conn dreads starting school. Finally, the time comes for her to join her older sister Laura as a first grader in the little one-room school by the side of the dirt road in front of her home on Mare Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky. Emily decides that she does not like school and is not going to listen or learn. However, when her own life gets caught up in the mystery of a backwoods family, she not only learns reading, writing, and arithmetic, but she also discovers that another culture exists outside her little world. She experiences her first love and her first...

It's 1966 and Emily Conn is fourteen years old and in eighth grade. She loves living in Betsy Layne, a small community in Floyd County, Kentucky, and enjoys going to school and being with her friends. In this final volume of the Eastern Kentucky Girl series of books, Emily begins to blossom as a writer as well as in her understanding of what it means to be a loving sister and friend. She comes to appreciate the struggles of others, finally comprehending lessons she received early in life about the familial bond of all people. Reaching the conclusion that change is the only constant, Emily...