A young girl, carrying a burden of guilt that is not hers to bear, moves with her family to the struggling city of Reading, PA, where her ultimately sacrificial search for redemption brings reconciliation to her family, introduces spirituality, mercy and acceptance to several young friends, and re-awakens the faith of a burnt-out priest.

SYNOPSIS:

Samantha Lee, her mom Denise, big brother Shane, and little sister Hannah, are on the run from an abusive father, who in an explosive first scene breaks into their apartment looking for her. Shane takes quite a beating from his father before his mother and the neighbors intervene.

Several years later, the struggling family has moved into a ratty trailer in Reading, Pennsylvania. Shane, now seventeen, is always on edge, strung out by constant instability and his family’s dependence on him for the protection that he can’t provide. Eight year old Hannah has an obviously prosthetic eye. Samantha stumbles upon a sleepy local church where the priest, Lynn, has become stagnant in her faith. Lynn and Samantha soon connect, and Samantha begins to reveal her uncanny spiritual sensibility.

Samantha brings her pervasive spirituality to school, where she gathers a group of faithful friends. With Samantha’s urging, they begin to meet with Lynn, as well as create a clubhouse in an abandoned tractor-trailer. She runs afoul of the local bully, Jason, and his friends Joe and Hunter, when she repeatedly derails their attempts to harass her friends.

Lynn is surprised by Samantha’s serious and far-reaching questions and responses. Samantha reveals that Hannah lost her eye after being hit with a broken beer bottle thrown by her father and meant for Samantha. She carries a burden of guilt for Hannah’s injury, as well as the family’s need to stay a step ahead of this violent, vengeance-seeking man.

Shane wrestles with his sense of family responsibility and his need for a life of his own. He clashes with his mother and his classmates, unsettled and angry, but steps in to protect a little boy playing too close to the ubiquitous railroad tracks. This gains him an unlikely job as babysitter and a new friendship with the child’s mother.

Other characters have struggles of their own. Leslie’s father is a black-out alcoholic. A scrawny ninth-grader, Mike, tries to insinuate himself into Jason’s gang but is violently rejected, and when Samantha steps in, disarming the boys with her simple peace, Mike is only more angry. Lynn begins to revive her prayer life, her sermons, and her relationship with her son, due in large part to Samantha’s spiritual witness.

Samantha intercedes again when Mike takes a life-threatening bet from Jason and the gang to jump a moving train at the nearby tracks. Samantha ends up on the tracks with Mike, and Shane, arriving at the last moment, cannot save her from being hit by another train as she pulls Mike to safety.

Samantha has survived but has lost a leg. In the hospital, Samantha reveals to Lynn that she has finally found redemption through her sacrifice, connecting in both their minds the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and her own. Lynn wrestles with the brutality and grace of a sacrificial life. Samantha and her family disappear from Reading unexpectedly, but everyone, except Mike, has been affected by Samantha and her brief time with them.

Months later, Shane brings a message from Samantha to the youth group. Shane has stayed in Reading and is forming a life for himself at last. Through a letter from Samantha, the group is energized to pursue Samantha’s grace-filled outlook: “Everybody deserves a chance”.