Devastated by the loss of a second father, thirteen-year-old Bird follows her stepfather from Cleveland to Alabama in hopes of convincing him to come home, and along the way helps two boys cope with their difficulties.
In 1957, when her preacher father accepts a post in Jericho, Alabama, Jo wants to fit in but her growing friendship with an African-American boy forces her to confront the racism of the South and to reconsider her own values.
In 1975, thirteen-year-old Ruby Mae Vickers disappears in Alvin, Alabama. Leah Teal, new detective of Alvin, is assigned to the case. After three months, Ruby Mae finally turns up dead beneath a willow beside a swamp. Twelve years later, another little girl goes missing. Then another. Leah is sure these incidents are connected to the one she failed to solve a dozen years ago. The job of finding them again falls to Leah. Then Leah's own daughter joins the list of missing girls.
Orphan Thomas Rider returns to the town of his birth at the age of eighteen to learn the truth about his parentage and how and why his mother came to destroy Ashland, Alabama's annual Watermelon Festival and accompanying fertility rite.
In 1931, a miner's family in Alabama tries to make it through the Depression while dealing with racial tension in their small town, the possibility of a disastrous mining accident, and the discovery of a dead infant in their well.
Presents a photographic introduction to the history, geography, government, and people of Alabama, and includes a look at the state flag and other symbols, a regional recipe, a list of notable Alabamans, photographs, and a glossary.
Raphael Semmes Cody, a fifteen-year-old boy who is fascinated with the outdoors, studies the creation and destruction of four ant colonies in Alabama, and when he grows up, he decides to go to Harvard Law School in order to fight for his environmental beliefs, and the fate of the Nokobee wildland, in the courtroom.
