Winner of the 2022 Eric Hoffer Award, Young Adult Category and a First Horizon Award

June Baker has lived a mostly idyllic life on her family’s small farm in Maynardville, Tennessee. They don’t have much, but they are rich in love and happiness. But when the Great Depression spreads misery throughout America, June’s family is hit hard, and she finds she must make sacrifices she’d never imagined.

As her family suffers setback after setback, her beloved brother goes train hopping to find work. In a tragic twist of fate, fourteen-year-old June ends up train hopping herself. Riding the rails tests her resolve like nothing before, but what she comes home to just might crush her.

In this debut by Cheryl King, spunky and lovable June goes from sitting on top of the world to carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders in a coming-of-age tale about family, friendship, love, loss, and hope.

Sequel to Sitting on Top of the World

Winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Young Adult Category

June's new normal: Her brother is gone, her dad is gone, her mother is grieving, and June must find her place in the world. Her beau Jimmy is her only tonic. But when tragedy strikes again, she knows exactly who to blame for all her sorrows: Paul Burnett, the railroad bull who started the chain of devastation when he killed her brother.

June sets out on a dangerous journey to make him pay, hopping freight trains to get where she needs to go, and accidents, floods, and attacks plague her route to revenge. Then when she gets to the Burnett farm in Lafayette, Virginia, she learns the truth about what happened to her brother out on the rails, and she's drawn right back into the things that made her fall in love with this place a year ago - including Paul.

Now she must decide where she belongs - with Paul and his family, or back home with Jimmy in Maynardville, where everything she holds dear is there under the pawpaw trees.