[1][2] First published in 2001, the story starts with the Cardinal family planning to move from New York to California due to money problems, then shifts to the mountains of Virginia after a car accident leaves the father dead and the mother in a catatonic state.
The novel was made into a 2013 theatrical film scripted by Baldacci and starring Mackenzie Foy and Ellen Burstyn as a granddaughter and grandmother.
Lou is a 12-year-old girl whose world is thrown into chaos when her father, whom she is very attached to, is killed, and her mother stuck in a comatose state.
She is strong-willed, tough, and a little arrogant, quick to take (and sometimes to give) offense, and very thoughtful and almost openly critical.
Amanda Cardinal – the mother of Lou and Oz, she is very protective of her children, and makes a great sacrifice for them when she uses her own body as a shield during the fateful accident.
Helped by her children, in the end, she finds the strength to struggle out of her coma and plays a key role in moving the jury in court.
She is very hardy both physically and mentally despite her age, willing to stand up for herself no matter what the opponent, and acts as caretaker of the children.
Originally displayed as a mysterious person who never speaks, he turns out to be very considerate and focused, always on task and helpful.
He is fun-loving and brave, seemingly unafraid of anything, going so far as to cross a chasm on a log, crawling under a locomotive that can start at any moment, and going in to save his dog with a stick of burning dynamite, which kills him, not too far away.
He is the main hope for Louisa's land as he battles out a legal case with Thurston Goode, a renowned lawyer.
However, Amanda, his wife, is opposed to the idea, stating that they would not be happy and that Jack would not be free to write as he pleases, being controlled by the movie studios.
Lou overhears two men discussing the fate of the children, and offers the idea of moving in with their great-grandmother in the mountains of Virginia, Louisa Mae.
When they arrive at the station, an African-American man picks them up and drives them through a series of towns, each more sparsely populated than the one previous.
Diamond, the boy they picked up, starts playing a bigger role, often taking the children out on adventures, showing them things such as a little collection of items, a wishing well, a danger-filled shortcut to the city, his version of constellations and the like.
In the book's epilogue, in which Lou is in her golden age, she writes that after the trial, Cotton and her mother married the following year, and soon afterwards he adopted the children.
Lou states that, like her father, she left the mountains to become a famous writer, but she, unlike Jack, returned years later to live out the rest of her life at the family home.