All manner of calamity has pared down the Willoughby family to but two descendants - Kate, a wise and watchful teenager, and Addy, her reclusive and needy mother. With the death of her brother in Vietnam and her father's suicide, Kate becomes her mother's keeper - paying bills with the same efficiency she applies to her studies and retreating behind the sturdy, protective walls of the family's limestone mansion from the gossipy community of Fayette, Illinois.

When her mother's broken heart fails, Kate becomes the full heiress to the family's tragedy.

At her mother's funeral, however, Kate is introduced to lively and eccentric southern relations she didn't know existed - her Uncle Charlie and his two sons, Gilbert and Hap. In a sweeping gesture that is at once comforting and insidious, Uncle Charlie takes Kate under his wing and takes charge, encouraging her precocious self-determination while staking his family's claim as kin.

Kate drops out of school and falls under Gilbert's mysterious, seductive spell - following him on an odyssey that takes her from youthful trust to a precarious, premature awakening to womanhood.