Mo is not only eighteen-year-old Annie's best friend, he is the one who helps her cope with the loss of her older sister, so when he learns he must leave Kentucky and return to Jordan with his family, Annie suggests a shocking alternative.

After dropping out of college, nineteen-year-old Laurel Early returns to her uncle's tobacco farm, where she encounters a monster as well as her mother's ghost, and soon Laureal realizes that she must tap into her own innate magic to save everyone she loves.

Curley Hines has lost his father, mother, and brother to coal mining, and now he lives with his grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Wonder Gap, Kentucky--but when the mining company prepares to destroy their mountain he must use the words his grandfather has taught him to save Red Hawk Mountain, even if it means losing the life he loves.

As winter arrives and the local school closes until summer, the Fairchild children continue their schooling in the parlor with the oldest, Althy, teaching.

Samantha and Tor find their wedding album as they prepare for the birth of their first child and remember the series of disasters that made Samantha think that maybe they weren't meant to get married.

At summer camp Jane feels like an outsider among the cliquish rich girls who board their horses at Sunny Acres farm, and when the horse she has been riding is sold to another camper, she feels even worse until her teacher asks her to help train a beautiful but skittish new horse, and the experience brings out the best in her.