In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

In 1957, problems at the mine threaten to ruin Christmas for fifth-grader Don, his family, and the rest of their Oklahoma coal town, but Don's bloodhound, Frank, is determined to do whatever it takes to make the holiday special for Don and his six-year-old sister, Susan. Alternate chapters are told from the human and canine points of view.