At her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before: Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer; Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and almost as quickly find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial artist. But Kenneth is losing his eyesight, and when Alice and Theo begin reading aloud to him from the journals of Lewis and Clark, they decide to embark on a wilderness adventure of their own--with unexpected results.

Carrie Brown is the author of two previous novels, Lamb in Love and Rose’s Garden, both of which can be purchased as Sound Library audiobooks. A journalist and newspaper editor before she began writing fiction, she teaches writing at Sweet Briar College and lives near the college with her husband, novelist John Gregory Brown, and their three children.