Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the Federal Writer's Project to write the first official account of Macedonia, West Virginia history. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture in the town and their identity tied to its knotty history. Layla enters their lives and lights a match to the family veneer and a truth comes to light that will change each of their lives forever. As Layla embarks on this grand adventure to establish historical moments in print, her first friend, the town librarian Ms. Betts wisely cautions: "There is a problem with history. All of us see a story according to our own lights. None of us is capable of objectivity." Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and told through the voices of three narrators--Layla Beck, Jottie Romeyn, and her niece, twelve year old Willa--this is an intimate family novel of love and family, of history and truth.