Jared is past fifty when he and Louella marry in 1939. They acquire eighty acres of marginal Iowa land and sell his car to buy a team of horses. Louella bears five children in the drafty farmhouse, with no indoor plumbing or central heat. At night, a kerosene lamp casts a circle of light for homework, board games, and Louella’s library books.

They add forty acres and a used tractor. But for Jared, it's a new world of machines and capital, where debt collectors from big-city finance companies will humiliate a man in front of his son. His world, where neighbors trade labor and a man’s word serves as collateral, is disintegrating, and he with it.

Willie, the much-loved first son, tries to protect Stefan, the youngest, from their father’s anger.

Jane, the oldest girl, suffers from the contrast between her family’s subsistence life and that of the town kids she goes to school with, but she waits, with a child’s faith, for the good year that will pay for her own bedroom.

When electricity comes to the farm, Amy, the youngest girl, sees, along with the miracle of electric lights, the loss of the warm circle that drew the family close about the kitchen table.

Growing up in the pre-feminist fifties, Amy sees her mother quietly bury her own dreams, and ultimately she must decide whether to marry a farm boy.