Truth is unhappy about being sent to North Carolina to live with her mother's relatives instead of going to California with her father, whom she loves.

She knows her father thinks that he is going to die from his tuberculosis and that he has sent her to North Carolina so that she will have someone to care for her after he is gone. He does, indeed, die during the book.

Truth is a first-rate heroine; aided by her faith in God, she bears up under the painful circumstances of her life.

One of the first things she hears when at her new home is that she is a "kettle cousin"—fit only for scraps from the dinner table after the others have eaten—and that she might get the Bardwells in trouble with the law. Rather than buckling under the misery that...