Turner Buckminster can't find anything good to say about his first six hours in Phippsburg, Maine, where even baseball is a different game. he's about ready to light out for the Territories, wherre every shirt he wears won't have to be starched white and no one will know him as the new minister's son. But after meeting Lizzie Bright Griffin, a smart and sassy girl who lives on nearby Malaga Island, a poor community founded by former slaves, he doesn't feel quite so miserable. Lizzie shows Turner how to hit a Maine baseball, dig for clams along the shore, and row a boat next to a whale -- opening up a whole new world to him, one filled with the mystery and wonder of Maine's rocky coast.

But the two soon discover that the town elders, along with Turner's father, want to force the people of Lizzie's island to leave so that a lucrative tourist trade can be started there. Although Turner is forbidden to step foot on the island, he and Lizzie try to save its people -- and get caught up in a spiral of disasters that alter their lives forever.

Gary D. Schmidt has crafted a unique coming-of-age novel based on the true event of an island's distruction in 1912.