Karen Godwell isn't as much ashamed of her mountain heritage as of what she had to do to preserve it. She reinvents herself at college and doesn't look back till her clan's historic farm is threatened. This gutsy New York Metropolitan Museum curator returns to the mountains, only to come face to face with who she was and what she did. Descendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands in the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce sees life through the family's colorful past; a local conservationist keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; Karen's nine-year-old daughter is in the throes of the mission her dying father sent her on; and Karen is hiding the ugly secret that drove her away.