Seventeen year-old Laurel Evers is running off to a fictional village in rural Maine in search of an idyllic existence that hasn't existed since the era of the horse and buggy. Life was more pastoral then. People fished and hunted. They grew their own potato crops and made throat lozenges from locally-grown spearmint boiled in metal cauldrons over the stove. Women braided floor mats from swamp-grown rushes, and even fashioned sandals from those very same pliable plants. The Civil War was a recent memory not some moldy, historical trivia and neighbors were more 'civil' or at least it seemed that way.