This is unfortunately not one of the better books in the vintage young adult category. Sarah Jane is the oldest of four girls with farmer parents who can barely put food on the table, let alone send Sarah Jane to college. Her father is a farmer through-and-through; no matter how bad things get, he always wants to start anew on another farm rather than find some other occupation. Fortunately Sarah Jane wins a scholarship, but her father wants to move the family west to Oregon, where he thinks he can find some farmland to lease, and Sarah Jane feels she must go along, even though she has both college and a job lined up to pay for room and board. The family literally piles into a pick-up truck with a trailer behind it, with every possession they have. And an amazing coincidence happens when the pick-up breaks down, and Sarah Jane's love interest, Tom, appears just in time to help them, because his family is doing the exact same thing -- picking up and moving the entire family to Oregon!

Aside from the ridiculousness of that plot element, the book is poorly written. Sarah Ann's three younger sisters are, except for one incident, so cheerful during all this that they constantly laugh and make quips and otherwise speak in ways that don't sound anything like real girls. More importantly, Sarah Jane is not particularly likable, in between her belief that she should get to make decisions for the entire family, and in her moodiness about Tom. One minute she loves him and that's all that matters, the next minute she can't possibly be with him because he's a farmer, and she's done with farming. (She neglects to remember he's already got one year of college under his belt, and never simply asks him what he intends to do!) The worst writing appears when Sarah Jane is feeling romantic:

"Tom." To say the word, Sarah Jane's lips formed a kiss. She stood perfectly still for a second, staring at the trick of sunlight which formed the asphalt road to empty into a shimmering lake.

... Again on her lips was a kiss, a spoken kiss in saying his name, Tom. But the wind whipped it from his hearing and her silly shyness covered it in her heart.

Lest anyone think I'm being too hard on this book by not making allowances for when it was written, I've read a lot of YA fiction from the 1950s-1960s, and this one truly is sub-par. In fact, I've read two other books specifically where the main character is dismayed at her love interest's choice of profession. In one, a girl is determined never to marry a restaurant man because she hates that her family's restaurant has dominated their lives. In Rosamond du Jardin's Pam and Penny series, Pam thinks she could never be happy as a farmer's wife, but she learns that farmers aren't all uneducated country bumpkins. Both of those books are far superior to this one. ( )