Sarah Quinn was forced into marriage by village bully Kenny Blake in her past life. Her good farmland was taken, her parents died of grief, and she starved and froze to death. Reborn on the day of the forced marriage in 1985, she refuses on the spot and trades her good farmland for the unwanted West Hill wasteland of the Blake family. The whole village laughs at her—no one knows that under that rocky ground lies a massive gravel deposit, and two years later the highway will pass right by. She ignores the mockery, clears the land, mines gravel, builds greenhouses for off-season vegetables, and her life gets better and better. Village bully Robert Blake and his son get jealous and pull dirty tricks—digging up roads, mixing soil, inciting land grabs—but Sarah uses her foreknowledge to foil them one by one. Carter Reed, a down-to-earth support official, is honest and reliable, helps her many times, and the two fight side by side, growing closer. In the end, Sarah turns the gravel plant into a village collective enterprise, leads the whole village into farming and rural tourism, and the villagers' income increases tenfold. She is named a provincial model for prosperity and lives her best life.
