REBECCA WAGNER comes of age in the late 1890s while living on a farm surrounded by virgin timber in the Shade Mountains of Juniata County, Pennsylvania. Her world is threatened by conflict between her wish to become more than a farm girl and the contrasting expectations of those who love her.

BACK SO STRAIGHT, a mysterious Native American healer who has lived on the edge of the farm for as long as Rebecca remembers, mentors her. She guides and advises the young woman and teaches her to use trees and plants as medicine.

When the family barn burns down, there is little hope of recouping their loss. After the fire, the owner of a lumber company who is setting up lumber camps and mills in the surrounding mountains, offers lumber and money to rebuild the barn in exchange for 100 acres of virgin Wagner woodland. But in time it becomes clear that his motives are not entirely neighborly.

Rebecca becomes friends with his daughter MAGGIE and Maggie's friend LILLY. Their families' luxurious lifestyle gives Rebecca a glimpse of what it would be like to live without housework, farm chores and taking care of aging grandparents.

Her relationship with her two friends grows with each excursion into the forests. Although they marvel at Rebecca's knowledge of the mountains and wildlife, danger from animals and a rogue lumbermill worker threatens them. Over the next few years, the three young women form a bond that will be severely tested by violence and the distance between them.

Rebecca meets BEN, a young man who runs his family's carriage business. She falls in love and hopes to someday plan a future with him. However, the rogue lumberman also tries to win her affection, but when she refuses to return his efforts, he harasses and stalks her. She tries to avoid him but his attempts to intimidate her escalate.

Despite her struggles, Rebecca graduates from high school and accepts a sponsorship from the town doctor and Lilly's father to attend the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses. In Baltimore, she encounters people she's never seen--people of color, foreign-speaking immigrants--as well as diseases, poverty and back-breaking work that challenge her will to continue. There she meets CHRISTOPHER, a resident doctor from a prominent family who introduces her to the finer things in life. She risks all for him despite her promise to Ben, the man she gave her heart to in Juniata County.

Although Rebecca graduates from nursing school with honors, a series of disappointments force her to return to the farm. Once there, she discovers the trees being clear-cut at an alarming rate, displacing animals and plants where rich diversity once thrived. Now it is up to her to decide her future as a young woman with limited life choices--and what, if anything, she can do about the disappearing forests surrounding her childhood home.