Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Ordered to practice his writing skills in the blank book his mother gave him, fourteen-year-old Johnny would rather go fishing near his home on North Carolina's Outer Banks and cannot think of anything important to write until two "dingbatters" from Ohio arrive in 1900 and try to build a flying machine.

"The eventually internationally recognized writer Lily Blennerhassett" spends her thirteenth summer missing her best friend and keeping a journal of her boring life at home and exciting newly-discovered relatives.