It is set in 1947 and follows the imaginative 10-year-old Sally, who likes to make up stories in her head, her family moves from New Jersey to Miami Beach.

While not as controversial as some of her other novels, Blume does manage to address the following themes of late 1940s life in America: racism, anti-Semitism and sibling rivalry.

Sally J. Freedman moves from New Jersey to Miami, Florida with her brother, Douglas, their mother, and grandmother at the end of World War II.

The next day, Sally goes back to visit them and discovers that laws requiring racial segregation in the 1940s in the Southern United States force them to move to another car on the train.

She, who is Jewish, notices that Mr. Zavodsky looks similar to Adolf Hitler and comes to believe (because of her active imagination) that he is actually him in disguise and retiring in Miami.

In the one year Sally spends in Miami, she learns how babies are made, attends but loses a contest, drinks whiskey while attempting to make Creme de Cacao, kisses Peter at their teacher's wedding, and in the end, strengthens her relationship with her relatives.

Racial segregation is also noted in this book, both from the above-mentioned situation on the train with the black family, and another incident where Sally inadvertently drank from a "colored" drinking fountain in a drug store and a woman pulled her off it and freaked out over what she might "catch" from it.