Michael is almost eight years old and the middle child of a struggling Tennessee family. At play he is often a pirate, imagining ferocious fights and feats of derring-do. He also has an unusually strong serious side and spends a lot of his time trying to figure out how to ease his mother's burden. The mixture of his vivid imagination and intense wish to help his family draw him into an adventure which surprises not only him, but his mom and two sisters as well.