This is a very appealing story of how a girl was able to help her family build a new life, set against the au thor's own Pacific Northwest background. All sorts of storms blew up there on the shore of the Columbia River during the spring and summer that teenage Sally spent with her guardian's family. Pretty, gay Sally could not understand why her uncle, as her guardian, insisted she leave her fashionable girls' school to visit them, why he was a fisherman when the family cannery had always been prosperous, why her seventeen-year-old cousin Chris was on crutches as the result of an accident and treated like a baby by his mother, or why Chris and her aunt showed such bitterness toward her. It was all so different from the happy times she remembered on earlier visits when her mother was alive.