When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents’ farm, and he doesn’t know what to expect.

The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed . . . marooned . . . blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don’t speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited . . . and eager for Jim to teach her English. Will Jim adjust to his strange new surroundings? Or will he continue to long for a home he can never regain?