Living with an eccentric little brother can be tough. Falling through the ice at a skating party and nearly drowning are grounds for embarrassment. But having a vision and narrating it to assembled onlookers? That solidifies your status as an outcast.

What Ruby Carson saw during that fateful hallucination was her entire hometown -- houses and people -- floating underwater. Then an orange-tipped surveyor stake appears in a field, another in the cemetery. Soon everyone discovers that a massive dam is being constructed and their homes will eventually be swallowed by rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, long-simmering secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its demise, 14-year-old Ruby watches it all from a front-row seat.

Set in the 1960s, The Town That Drowned deftly evokes the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place, any place, to call home.