Ten year-old Janie Webster sees a runaway inmate from the Traverse City State Hospital, thus starting a chain of events that lead her through the summer of 1946. In her goal to right injustices, Janie tries to stop her best friend Eddie from being physically abused. When he disappears, Janie becomes determined to find him. During this search, she first becomes aware of adult bias and cultural stigmas. Janie struggles to understand adult decisions; including the slow shattering of her parent’s marriage, the impending lobotomy of her eighty year old neighbor, hypocrisy in members of a fundamentalist religion, a neighbor’s domestic violence episode, a pedophile, and clandestine teen sexual encounter. Janie attempts to reconcile the vast difference in what adults say, and what they actually do when they think no one is looking. These experiences lead Janie to search for meaning in her overtly racist and classist post war, religiously hypocritical, mid-west community.
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