 There, they hope to find their missing mother at the home of a relative they have never met.The children find themselves on a journey that is emotional as well as literal; during their weeks on the road, their adventures and the people they meet along the way help them to find out more about who they are and what is important to them, as well as to cope with the loss of their mother and to understand society's reaction to her poverty, isolation, mental illness, and the fact that she was an unmarried mother of four.Thirteen-year-old Dicey Tillerman, and her brothers James (10) and Sammy (6), and sister Maybeth (9), lived in a wooden house out in the dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts.