August 1930; Clifton Country, Oklahoma. There was no rain. Cassie Taylor was five years old that summer, a thin, hungry-looking child with lank blond hair and a heart-shapped face. The daughter of a drunken, weak-willed share-cropper. She was raised by the grandmother and tyrannized by her crazed half-brother. But Cassie, first as a child, carves out a life of purposefulness and vision from the poverty and dry red dust out of Clifton Country.