When Maurine and Dena Durham are left motherless at an early age, their father John turns to the convent in Sherman, Texas, for help in rearing his daughters. In the convent the girls try the nuns' patience with their pranks and begin calling each other "Sookie." Six years later they return home where house keeping and cooking produce calamitous results with poor dad pulling his hair. They discover boys, bobbed hair and experiment with beauty secrets while secretly corresponding with a lonely man in Alaska. College days are not humdrum. Maurine is exiled from campus as a reprobate while Dena embraces the twenties with boys, booze and dance. Yet both manage to graduate. Trouble follows the Sookies as they travel to the feuding hill of Kentucky, scandalizing their Grandma by traveling with two male friends and a gun. Their trip is fraught with misplaced money, bed bugs and flat tires. Back home can Sherman survive the liberated Sookies as they look for love?