Narrator and chief protagonist Mississippi “Mibs” Beaumont is named for the state where she and her family spent the years before they moved to Kansaska-Nebransas. Like the others in her family, Mibs has a “savvy,” or magic power—hers is reading minds through people’s tattoos—but it’s new to her, and she struggles to deal with all the thoughts coming at her. She doesn’t want this power but instead hopes her savvy is to awaken people, which would mean that she can rouse her father from his coma.

Mibs finally accepts her real power and adapts it to awaken her dad. Her overnight, cross-country bus trek, accompanied by a motley collection of siblings and outsiders, becomes a training ground where she learns the first steps in scumbling, or managing, her savvy and using it to help others. She also discovers that she has more friends—Lill, Lester, Bobbi, and Will—than she knew. Mibs’s experience is a hero’s journey that rewards her with a new and positive power, high esteem in the community, and her father’s safe return to the family.