You can make your life extraordinary, if you have the courage.

Cecilia Howison, the rich and well-known daughter of a prominent East Tennessee family, appears to be the perfect Southern girl, cultured, gracious, virginal. The actual lesbian she is feels restless and ready for something new. She finds it in a high mountain meadow: a girl, wearing nothing but overalls, asleep beside a violin. Cecilia accepts the challenge.

Airey Fitch is the mainstay of her family’s hard-scrabble hill farm. She has no love for the Howisons or any their kind, who now, in 1931, are evicting the mountain folk to create a new national park. Despite them, she will hang on, despite them, she will seek a life in music. When Cecilia offers to make that happen, Airey dares to trust her. And wonders at Cecilia’s hold on her thoughts.

Cecilia understands all too clearly the risks she runs by wooing Airey Fitch but cannot stop, lured like a moth to Airey’s flame. Airey wants more than the passion Cecilia gives her—wants her heart. But the world they live in forbids it, and Cecilia is faced with a choice that only love can make.