Setting is very important to Permanent Connections. The main setting of the novel is a farm house six miles from Tyler Mills, North Carolina, in the southern Appalachians. The young adult characters, Rob and Ellery, are both in the mountainous rural area under protest: Rob Dickson has been sent from suburban Montclair, New Jersey, to take care of his injured uncle because the location is too remote and the family too cantankerous to find local help. Ellery Collier is living with her mother, who left a successful banker husband in Charlotte to pursue weaving and her own identity on the mountainside above the Dickson house.

Ellery misses her now-broken home, her friends back in Charlotte, and her music lessons. Both are unhappy outsiders in the region and in school, in a place where everyone else appears to be settled and secure.

Bridgers is too good a novelist to...