Carrie Baxter is five years old, living with her parents in Kentucky when the roads that connect her life are destroyed by global disasters: a massive earthquake, backlashes of tidal waves and floods. Communication fails, and her family, like so many others, is separated as people rush to escape the terror that remains. Eleven years later the protected haven her grandparents shaped for her in Stears Branch is shaken again, not by worldwide disasters, but by the upheaval of a nineteen-year-old boy who comes barreling into their secluded valley in his yellow El Camino. The Road Builders is a story of loss, love, forgiveness, and restoration.