The primary setting for Peck's story is the Illinois town of Bluff City based on the author's hometown of Decatur as it might have been in 1914. Bluff City is a largely agricultural community with two leading families, two social worlds on two sides of the tracks, and a strong emphasis placed on conformity. It has all the expected charms of drugstore ice cream parlors, streetcars, reputedly haunted houses, and the leisurely pace of an earlier era. But Bluff City also possesses the marks of class prejudice and general close-mindedness. Mrs. Shambaugh, the town's leading socialite, heads the influential Daughters of the American Revolution while her teen-age daughter heads the equally exclusive Sunny Thoughts and Busy Fingers Sisterhood. On the other hand Blossom Culp and her mother, an impoverished Gypsy fortune teller, live in a shack that local political candidates promise to have torn down each election year.

When...