Will living in big cities drive you crazy? Just ask commercial artist Charles Colgrove. In 1951, under psychiatrist's orders, he flees his suburban Long Island home and job in New York City with his wife and three young daughters. After a long train ride they arrive in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, at a 200-year-old farm that is falling apart from years of neglect.
As Charles struggles to regain his mental health and establish a home and art studio, his family finds that they are less than welcome in their rural community. They occupy prime farmland but let it go fallow, an inexcusable waste according to the locals.
Margaret, the eldest daughter and a budding artist in her own right, chronicles the physical and mental challenges that the family faces – polio, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, rejection, overbearing in-laws, sexual assault, exposure to tuberculosis, isolation at school – to name a few.
Will they survive and adapt in this rural culture that seems alien to them? Or will the Colgroves disintegrate, or worse yet, return to the madness of big city life?