Karen Godwell isn’t as much ashamed of her mountain heritage as of what she once had to do to preserve it. She reinvents herself at college and doesn’t look back till her clan’s historic farm is threatened. The gutsy curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did. Decendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands deep in the folds of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family's colorful past; Tom Gibbons, a local conservationist, keeps one eye on the dwindling mountain properties and the other on Karen; Karen's nine-year-old daughter, Hali, is in the throes of the mission her dying father sent her on; while Karen keeps buried the ugly secret that drove her away. As she wrestles her dangerously cunning brother for the farm, Karen straddles the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she has become a part of.