The outrageous bestseller that stars Sissy Hankshaw--flawlessly beautiful, almost. A small-town girl with big-time dreams and a quirk to match--hitchhiking her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bag. . . . Follow Sissy's amazing odyssey from Virginia to Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax.
"This is one of those special novels--a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane."--Thomas Pynchon

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all "bursting with dimples and hormones"--and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.

Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins's classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.