In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

"Twelve-year-old Vonceil cannot wait for her older brother Elber to come home to the family farm in Oklahoma after serving on the front lines of World War I. But the young man who greets her at the train station is serious and responsible, not the fun-loving brother she remembers, and he doesn't have time for her anymore -- especially not after he marries his plain, boring childhood sweetheart. Soon after the wedding, glamorous, mysterious Greda arrives...