When her father is sent to jail and she gets shipped off to live with her aunt in a farming community in Arkansas, glam teen and L.A. native West Deschanel turns to the only hot boy in town for help in planning her escape from Nowheresville.
Young Maya leads a precarious existence in racist, Depression-era Arkansas, where she is shunted between her grandmother's house and her mother's--where she is raped--and withdraws into total silence. She endures to share her realization in her valedictory address: "In order to lift your voice, you have to lift your head.".
Seventeen-year-old Cullen's summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin's death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother's sudden disappearance.
Poet Maya Angelou chronicles her early life, focusing on her childhood in 1930s rural Arkansas, including her rape at the age of five, her subsequent years of muteness, and the strength she gained from her grandmother and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a respected African-American woman in her town.
With her mother in prison for killing her father, seventeen-year-old Jane seeks to escape her past and find self-reliance breeding rabbits on their Arkansas homestead.
Bookseller Claire Malloy, unsuccessful in her attempt to talk Emily Parchester down from the tree the retired teacher has camped out in to protest a developer's plan to clear cut the land, decides to investigate when the developer is murdered and his daughter, a teenager mother, is accused of the crime.
