You give a girl a taste of fresh air and then you take it away she ll grow fierce and wild to get it back.

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.

Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one.

Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she s been one of the 'unadoptable' girls at the town s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg s future.

But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose.

Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.

But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.