This story begins at a funeral where a young women, Ruth, is burying her husband while trying to keep her two and six year old daughters quiet and distracted. Ruth lost both her husband and her father-in-law in a bombing incident overseas. Now Ruth and her mother in-law Mabel are staying with family in a Mennonite community, on a cranberry farm in Wisconsin. The story has many plot twists and turns and you will often find yourself wondering how the issues that come up could ever be resolved.