All summer long, Emily Conn dreads starting school. Finally, the time comes for her to join her older sister Laura as a first grader in the little one-room school by the side of the dirt road in front of her home on Mare Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky. Emily decides that she does not like school and is not going to listen or learn. However, when her own life gets caught up in the mystery of a backwoods family, she not only learns reading, writing, and arithmetic, but she also discovers that another culture exists outside her little world. She experiences her first love and her first heartbreak. Through the efforts of a loving and gifted teacher, Emily comes to realize that school "ain't too awful bad." This book is the second in the Eastern Kentucky Girl series based on the childhood of Tina Rae Collins in Appalachian Kentucky, continuing the story that The Soup Bean War began.