High school girl Heaven is the eldest of five of Luke and Sarah, they live in the backwoods outside of the small town of Winnerow, West Virginia. She is the academically driven gifted one. She learns the reason why they are shunned as a family. It is more than their being poor, and the reason why she, out of the five, is the one shunned by Luke: Sarah is not her biological mother, wealthy Leigh Casteel, who ran away from home to marry Luke and who Heaven resembles, dying in childbirth, which Luke blames on Heaven. Beyond shunning Heaven, Luke is largely an absent father and husband, he often away looking for work with most of what little money he earns going toward booze for himself. As such, her siblings - teenagers Tom and Fanny, and young adolescents Janey and Keith - are her life. One new bright spot in Heaven's life is Logan, a new classmate and new arrival to Winnerow, who, attracted to her, treats her with kindness and respect in his deepening love for her. This bright spot is overshadowed when, out of circumstance, But when her stepmother leaves, Luke breaks up the family and sells her and her four siblings to different families. Heaven is sent to live with Kitty, Luke's ex and her younger husband Cal, a writer who she supports financially as he is unpublished. While she tries in vain to bring her family back together, she learns some other secrets of the Casteels. She will also find, unaware of the connection, that she is more her mother's daughter than just in appearance as she approaches womanhood.