This fine collection is unified in other ways, most noticeably through point of view: ten of the 13 stories are told by a smart-beyond-her-years child narrator. Ranging in age from eight to 14, these narrators—young girls who have invariably been injured to the bone—do not interpret the events around them or try to determine their significance, but simply give an account.

The opening story, "At the Other End of Nowhere," introduces the recurring theme of loss. The eight-year-old narrator's only parent, her mother, drowns when the St. Mark's and Wakulla rivers overflow. Ryals' lyrical writing captures both the devastation and strange, surreal beauty of the flood and the trauma of the young narrator as she witnesses her mother's dead body pulled from water: "...her face turned sideways towards us like she had been swimming away away away from the broil and groan with the humming under it like blood as it sliced and dissolved the face of this earth."

In "Pig on a Stick," arguably the most disturbing story in the book (although there a several close contenders), both parents have abandoned their three daughters. Eleven-year-old Juney and her two sisters, ages 8 and 3, are left to fend for themselves in the rotting family home, where the floor has disintegrated and the girls are tormented nightly by a wild hog. In the end, the house literally falls down around them and the girls wander outside to sleep in the back field.

The chilling title story deals with alcoholism and the particular brand of abuse and violence that comes with it. Dorinda's father gets drunk at one of his weekly Hunt Club parties, a regular get-together where good old boys drink bottles of Jack Daniels and bet on chicken fights. "I know Daddy is already Jacked, holding his bottle between his legs," Dorinda tells us. Inebriated and itching with unresolved rage, and "feeling like a tornado twister," he begins to whip his daughter's beloved horse Loki. Dorinda unsuccessfully begs her mother to intercede. When she attempts to enter the barn herself to stop the beating, her badly abused mother aims a shotgun at Dorinda's chest. The rules of the family and of the community are clear—women simply don't interfere in men's doings.

Firmly etched racial lines are also carefully examined. In the segregated Florida of that era, it is utterly taboo for whites and blacks to establish friendships. The rules for social contact are strictly codified by Jim Crow, and blacks interact with whites only as farm workers or domestic help. The pre-Civil Rights story "Sheer Curtains Going Down" pairs 11-year-old Rayann, the white daughter of the town's alcoholic doctor, with Cookie Johnson, one of only two black girls in the 5th grade. The story focuses on their connection, the rebellious thrill and very real risk of their blossoming friendship, forbidden by both the white and black families. Set several years later, at the onset of the Civil Rights lunch counter sit-ins, "Where Shadows Tangle and Snare and Sing" explores the life-threatening dangers faced by black Civil Rights workers, and to a lesser extent, by the whites who aid them.