In the summer of 1965, Josh, an athletic fourteen-year-old Jewish boy from New York City, travels to Hendersonville, North Carolina. He spends this summer with four distant and culturally different cousins who invite him to participate in the teenage rural "Olympics." These sports, all foreign to him, include shooting, rock skipping, horseshoe throwing, wood chopping, fishing, and mountain relay races. Living next to a white supremacist soldier returning from Vietnam and his brother, who is about to leave for Vietnam, Josh is exposed for the first time to a war that has yet to make the headlines. The police suspect these two brothers of stealing and killing family dogs in and around Hendersonville. As the police question them, Josh finds himself in mortal danger, and he experiences anti-Semitism at a level he hasn't seen before.