"I set this story back in my own dreaming, small-town South, in my own time, 1961: that suspended time swung between two epochs that shaped America for good and all. I think I chose it because that turbulent transition was the greatest epiphany of my life, a crossing from the sweet, insular world I knew to another one, volatile and frightening and yet entirely necessary and right." 

Raised by her emotionally distant, widowed father, and their housekeeper, Peyton McKenzie has become a shy tomboy with a terrible secret. Her only outlet is The Losers' Club, where she and her fellow outcasts top one another with their day's humiliations. Though she knows it can't go on forever, Peyton is not ready to give up her only source of friends. At the cusp of becoming a woman, young Peyton is desperate to hold onto her childhood. Her prim Aunt Augusta, however, thinks it is high time she became a proper young Southern lady, and is about to introduce Peyton to the hateful world of hair stylists and party dresses. And then Peyton's long lost cousin, Nora, blows into town driving a hot pink convertible, and proceeds to turn the sheltered world of Lytton, Georgia, on its head. The Civil Rights Movement has passed Lytton by, and Nora, fresh from a wild life on the road, is hell-bent on shaking things up. She is a blast of fresh air, revitalizing the entire McKenzie household, and captivating the young Peyton. But Nora is a dangerous role model. She, too, has a dark secret in her past. When the truth is revealed, it stuns the quiet town, and teaches Peyton the necessity, and the price, of love.