It is the summer of 1949 when nine-year-old Lilly Browns teenage cousin, Rosalie, romps into her life from the big city of Chicago and crowds her way into the little sharecropper shack Lilly shares with her younger sister, mother, and elderly grandparents in the backwoods of Georgia. Lilly is dismayed that Rosalie has disrupted her household, and Rosalie is less than thrilled with the new home she must share with her sharecropper relatives. Rosalie, who is all sass and bold as a lion, brings attitude to the familys small corner of the world. While she tells tales of her antics in the big city, Lilly hangs on to Rosalies every word and soon begins to dream of a better life that does not include picking cotton in the hot sun or sporadically attending school. But as Lillys coming-of-age journey eventually leads her to migrate north to Buffalo with her family, she quickly discovers that with every dream comes a struggle to make it come true. In this historical novel, a young African American woman migrates from Georgia to Buffalo, where she must battle seemingly insurmountable odds to make a better life for herself and her family.