In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.
During the Great Depression, twelve-year-old Artie Wilson, determined to escape plowing and planting the fields and milking the cow on her family's farm, longs to leave Buck Creek, Kentucky, and her life of poverty.
"When the patriarch of twelve-year-old Bean's sharecropping community dies, Bean gets a lesson in not only what it means to lose someone you love, but also in how his family and friends care for their dead"--