Frances Cressen has the perfect summer planned. She’s going to Camp Whitman with her best friend, Agnes. But Frances’s mother has something else in mind for the family: Mountain Ash, a spiritual retreat in the middle of nowhere. Frances can’t think of anything worse than Bible class and baby-sitting for eight long weeks—that is, until her mother drives away with her younger brother, Everett, and leaves Frances behind.Now a stranger is renting Frances’s house while she’s stuck living out by the graveyard with her odd aunt Blue. And Camp Whitman is a disaster. The boys in Frances’s group say that weird things are happening at Mountain Ash, and Frances begins to worry and to wonder. Everett doesn’t sound like himself anymore, and her mother never talks about coming home. Are they happier without Frances?From the Hardcover edition.