About the growing up of a Bulgarian peasant boy in a house where there was plenty of everything: food, work, and play, with festivals that brought in the whole village.

It was natural to suppose that when Dobry was a man he would inherit his mother's lands and take his grandfather's place as farmer and householder, important man in the village, but Dobry had other plans. He wanted to be a sculptor.

Roda, his mother, was devoted to Dobry, but she fairly worshiped the fields that gave them bread and she could not imagine Dobry's wanting to leave them. The wise old grandfather, too, believed in a man's duty to his fields, but besides being the best farmer in the village, the grandfather was also a philosopher and a story teller. He really was an artist himself and so sympathized with the boy and gradually won the mother's consent to Dobry's leaving for the art school in Sofia.

A book that gives older boys and girls a sense of what the land means to the people who live on it, and of the power of an idea to direct a boy's life. 

From the dust jacket