SYNOPSIS:

This is a coming of age story, and a thriller. Seventeen-year-old Kaitlyn has grown up in a trailer park in a Tennessee town about a hour’s drive away from Nashville. Her mother is drunk and out of it much of the time; Kaitlyn is the responsible adult in the household. She is dating Cory, a slightly older guy who works for a publisher on Music Row. He takes her to Nashville for the first time, and she is dazzled as he shows her around. (They are both songwriters.) Cory and Kaitlyn write songs together, and he gets Kaitlyn a summer job, caring for the kids of his boss, Gavin Wakefield, who has a hellish relationship with his ex-wife Deena. Cory drives Kaitlyn to Deena’s McMansion and lets her know about Gavin and Deena – it’s a bit like her situation with her mother; this is the rich-people version of adults who don’t act like adults. He says it’s not worth it for her to stay in the job just to try to make money or advance her career or Cory’s; if they don’t treat her well and if it feels wrong, leave. The three Wakefield kids, thirteen-year-old Alyssa, ten-year-old Trevor and six-year-old Siena, are snooty and skeptical about hillbilly bumpkin Kaitlyn, and like their father the older ones sneer at country music (Gavin was transferred to Nashville by the New York office against his will) but Kaitlyn wins them over, in part by playing songs she has written, with Cory and alone, on her guitar. Deena drags Kaitlyn and the kids to an upscale mall, and the kids let Kaitlyn know they have come to accept her. Gavin comes by the house, flirts with Kaitlyn and talks of advancing her career, and then has a loud, ugly fight with Deena, terrible for the kids upstairs to listen to. Deena decides that when Gavin comes in the morning for his visitation with the kids, they won’t be there. She takes Kaitlyn (who has never been on a plane before) and the kids to New York on a whim, and they all stay at the Plaza Hotel. Kaitlyn has found Nashville overwhelming – now she is amazed by NYC! Deena gives them lots of money and the kids spend a day taking cabs to the Village, having dim sum in Chinatown – showing Kaitlyn around. Alyssa quietly talks to her father on her cell phone and tells him where they are. When they are walking to meet Deena at Columbus Circle, they see a car come up on the curb, hit her and drive off. Gavin has arrived in NYC, but he has an alibi proving he was just leaving the airport at the time of the hit-and-run murder. At the police station, Alyssa tells Kaitlyn she is convinced her father hired whoever it was who killed her mother; she feels like an accomplice because she told him the meeting place. She says she read a true-crime book: OJ got custody of his kids. She does not want to go with her father, even for a little while. The other kids agree and they slip out of the station. Torn, Kaitlyn goes with them. She understands their feelings. Now she is on the run in NYC with no money and three kids who are sought by the police and their very angry father. Cory speaks to Kaitlyn before she throws her phone away in Central Park. A rainstorm means no flights from Nashville, so he drives all night. Kaitlyn and the kids are taken in by a Dominican family who say they must leave when they see an Amber alert about the kids in Spanish; they do not want to lose their greencards. The kids decide to head to Grandma’s apartment – or is it a trap?

COUNTRY GIRL