We experience, with Prudence, her coming of age in a place she has not felt fully comfortable until "the turning point" - the point at which she recognizes that the real challenge of life is to make of your self a good person no matter where you live.

With Prudence, as audience members experience homesickness for a place and people to which she cannot hope to return, and the sad realization that she is not very welcome to the place where her family has come to live. Hers is a story many of us could tell in varying degrees. The people who forced her family to flee their farm home in Homer, Georgian Banks County, the people who live next door and the people who are in her school in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood make her feel unwelcome. They do not actually appear in the play, but through Prudence's comments we learn something important about them and the reasons for their behaviors and attitudes. While this is a story of a person who lived in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, it is also a story of the neighborhood and the city of Indianapolis from 1919-1926.

We experience with Prudence how, with the help of her parents, she is able to grow into a young woman who learns to value what she has on several levels, who can make the changes in her attitude and personality to respect herself, and become a person who can accept and value others. We also get a glimpse into what the neighborhood was like after World War I and at the start of the Great Depression. There are parallels with world events and economics between then and now.