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Karen Godwell isn't as much ashamed of her mountain heritage as of what she had to do to preserve it. She reinvents herself at college and doesn't look back till her clan's historic farm is threatened. The gutsy New York Metropolitan Museum curator returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did. Descendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands deep in the folds of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family's colorful two-hundred-year past; Tom Gibbons, a local conservationist, keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; Karen's nine-year-old daughter, Hali, is in the throes of the mission her father sent her on before he died; and Karen is hiding the ugly secret that drove her away. As she wrestles her dangerously cunning brother for the farm, Karen straddles the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she has become part of.