Thirteen-year-old Ratchet spends a summer in Maine with her eccentric great-aunts Tilly and Penpen, hearing strange stories from the past and encountering a variety of unusual and colorful characters.

While Ratchet Clark's life has never been precisely normal, her mother's decision to send her to visit two ancient great aunts in Maine for the summer is weird even by her family's standards. As the summer unfolds, her aunts fill Ratchet in on all the details of their memorable lives, including servants eaten by bears, a groom dumped at the altar, and their mother's gruesomely ingenious suicide.