In June of 1953 Mark Antonich celebrates his twelfth birthday-and the beginning of a long summer he hopes will be filled with backyard reading, swimming in the town pool, and hanging out with his next-door cousin Tony Zivich. An ordinary summer in a small Connecticut farming town outside New Haven. But everything changes when his leisurely, dreamy days abruptly turn into what becomes a frightening summer-nightmarish events that will color the rest of his life. He watches, helpless, confused, as his home life starts to crumble: a rebellious, older sister drifting off with dangerous older friends, his quiet mother hospitalized with a mysterious illness, his father laid off from the factory, and on TV the awful specter of the Joseph McCarthy anti-Communist hearings that hit too close to home. Worse, Petar Ivo, his mother's distant cousin from Yugoslavia, one of the wandering Displaced Persons allowed into America after the horror of World War Two, moves in-and the walls of the house echo with fear and panic. As the young Croatian-American family struggles to survive, Mark grapples with a world that confuses and alarms him. As the dead, sticky days of August unfold, Mark begins his most harrowing journey.