" Golden Kite Award winner, 1989 Booklist , Editor's Choice School Library Journal , Best Books of 1988 Publisher's Weekly , Best Books of 1988 Twelve-year-old Amanda Perritt is pitched head-first into adult responsibilities when she has to quit school to care for her newborn brother and invalid mother. She gets an excape, she thinks, when she's offered a trip to stay with her grandmother and her sophisticated Aunt Laura in Memphis. But during the visit, she discovers unexpected parallels between her mother's childhood and her own and comes to understand her own individuality as well as what it means to be part of a family.

George Ella Lyon is a former Kentucky poet laureate and the award-winning author of more than forty books for children and adults, including Many-Storied House, Which Side Are You On? (Winner, Aesop Prize), She Let Herself Go, Back, and Catalpa (Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year). Her poem "Where I'm From" is featured in the PBS series The United States of Poetry and has become a model for teachers around the world. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.