When 13-year-old C.J. Brown learns that she'll be spending her entire summer away from her friends - isolated - in a small town in central Arkansas, she is utterly despondent. But as she begins meeting some of the rural village's residents, C.J. discovers she possess a strange and remarkable gift. And when she befriends an eccentric, 8-year-old rock hound, she soon finds herself being led headlong into the dark and foreboding bowels of the earth. As a greedy corporate geologist seeks to remove the residents of the small town from their land - in order to acquire the perfect water source for her client's factory - explosive charges are set off in one of the area's nearby caves. With that blast, C.J. and her unlikely companion must count on each other to escape from their would-be death trap - just as they appear to have discovered a remarkable cache of "Diamonds in the Rough."