After Annie Jacobson's older brother is deployed to Vietnam during the war, tragedy at home brings their estranged father home without welcome. As tensions heighten, Annie and her family must find a way to move forward as they try to hold both hope and grief in the same hand.

When Mindy announces that she is returning to Vietnam to find her birthmother, it inspires her father, mother, and sister to recall the events of her adoption at the end of the Vietnam War during Operation Baby Lift. In this beautiful time-slip story, Mindy's family reexamines what it means to grow together beyond genetic code.

Where you come from isn't who you are.Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need—and during these desperate times, there are plenty of both, even if half the town stands empty as people have packed up and moved on.Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God who Pearl just isn't sure she likes.Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River. Eddie is dangerous and he seems fixated on Pearl. When he reveals why he's really there and shares a shocking secret involving the whole town, dust won't be the only thing darkening Pearl's world.While the tone...