Late summer, 1941. Brick (boy's name) lives in a rural area on an apple orchard. Mariel a polio survivor, lives in Brooklyn with her adoptive mother, the nurse who took special care of her when she was in the polio ward of the hospital. That hospital was in Brick's town, and his parents are good friends with the nurse who adopted Mariel.
So when a wildfire destroys the orchard, Brick's parents each get temporary jobs in other towns and send him to Brooklyn for a year to live with their friend the nurse.
As soon as Brick arrives, he is plotting how to go back and help the owner of the orchard harvest any apples that survived the fire. And Mariel wants to go back also, to try to find her real mother, who she never saw again after being left at the hospital when she was four years old.
Though Giff's writing and research are fully up to par, the story left me kind of dry. Brick and Mariel's friendship seems to be instantaneous, rather than developing slowly over several chapters. When Mariel finds the answer she was looking for it feels oddly anticlimactic - perhaps because Giff gave more attention to Brick harvesting apples than to Mariel wanting to find her mother.
Not bad, but definitely not one of Giff's best either. ( )