Christine Holly is a small-town girl from Maryland's Eastern Shore, raised in a conservative home in a family deeply affected by the death of her sister at a young age. She meets and falls in love with a younger man, an Oklahoma farm boy whose prominent family owns substantial land and oil wells.

She marries, CJ, her "Prince Farming," and moves to the Plains to become a devoted farm wife. Her fantasies of an all-American agrarian life soon become nightmares when she discovers her new relatives are not the wholesome crowd she perceived. She finds herself thrust into a twisted drama of dysfunction, aberration, and shocking revelations that make her question her future—and her own sanity.

In Crude Awakening, Holly narrates a fictionalized account of her experiences as she's extracted from her staid and stable environs and moves into a crazy and chaotic environment with her new family. She tells of mustering the courage to leave her marriage and her dreams behind.