Big mouth Maddie is the fourth daughter born to George and Madeline McCall during the Great Depression in Minnesota. Maddie is driven by mischief and a quest for redemption from her struggle against society’s confines: she leads her first grade class on an escape from boarding school crossing the frozen Mississippi River, gets kicked out of Catholic high school for painting the fingernails and toenails of the statue of the Virgin Mary, tries to get a date with a mortician by lying in a casket, and sneaks into the Minnesota State Fair at age fifty. Along her journey she befriends her twenty-four sorority sisters and Irish animal-lover Patsy, who packs her freezer with the remains of birds, dogs, and goldfish until spring for a proper burial. Maddie and her family struggle, or not, with alcohol and smoking, adoption, an unexpected baby, a gay child, raising a family, religion, and being a working mother when society did not permit. It’s little wonder her soul mate Tom Hickey dies early. And death does not stop her from eavesdropping on her kids, family, and friends.