Like her protagonist, Young grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a place nearly synonymous with Mark Twain. Now a lecturer at American University and contributing editor for the Fiction Writers Review, Young has written what she describes as "the book Mark Twain would have written if Becky Thatcher had gone home for her high school reunion and found Tom Sawyer." Following Laura Brooks back to the hometown she left a decade before, the narrative recounts Laura’s complex feelings for the place and the emotional work she faces in coming to terms with a relationship that ended on an explosive Fourth of July ten years before, when the levees broke.