Twelve-year-old Emily Parmenter, her young life marked by the disappearance of her mother and the death of a beloved brother, has withdrawn into a world of her own making on the family's faded plantation in South Carolina where her father and brothers raise the legendary Lowcountry Boykin hunting spaniels, but everything changes when troubled debutante Lulu Foxworth comes to stay, hoping to escape her struggles with alcohol and sex addiction.