In 1860, Julia Jackson returns to her deceased Mother's Milledgeville, Georgia southern plantation to reunite with her grown cousins and friends. She recaptures the happy spirit of her childhood summers spent on the land. But soon these blissful emotions catapult her into a web of unbreakable love and into witnessing the vicious slaughter of men at the Civil War battles. Circumstances send her home to find the war has indeed invaded her town. She faces the life-altering changes the war brings to southern women. Amid the death and destruction in the south, she witnesses the reckoning of the slaves' hard-won freedom that leads her family to a bitter enlightenment.