World War II is on, and the present pushed by the future in Bentonville Holler, a place already fifty years behind. Sickly Brad Busby, nine-years-old is, brought to rural Missouri by his family to escape the unhealthy Kansas dustbowl. He is befriended by strapping fourteen-year-old Harry Goodnight, whose family holds to hill ways, but who yearns to see the world. It is 1943, yet here automobiles are novel, electricity and telephone's a hope. The hill dialect, the comic interface between old fashioned and new-fangled, the community of the holler folk, the Busby's struggle to give Brad growing room when they don't expect him to grow up, and the tragedy of ignorance, provide emotion and insight that make the story of a year in a little boy's life the story of a lifetime.