In 1988 Riley Travis is a young graduate student at Cornell University. A letter from her past takes her back to Brooklyn in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, when she was an imaginative, stage-struck twelve-year-old going on thirteen. A time when there were no computers, cell phones or malls and everyone shopped on Main Street, where she goes to find her Street of Dreams. There she makes a new friend, an out-of-work newspaper reporter who has a big influence on her life. We meet her family, friends and teachers and see life through her eyes, part-child part-teenager, as America is much too busy celebrating its 200th birthday to pay much attention to what is happening to her. Her dealings with the adult world that she lives in and her observations on what she sees turn everything that happens into an adventure in growing up.