| Plot: | Novalee Nation is a pregnant 17-year-old from Tennessee heading to California with her boyfriend Willie Jack, but is abandoned by him at a Wal-Mart store in Sequoyah, Oklahoma. Novalee has no job, no skills and only $5.55 in her pocket, so she secretly lives in the Wal-Mart until her daughter Americus is born six weeks later. Novalee decides to raise her daughter and rebuild her life in Sequoyah, with the help of eccentric but kind strangers. Based on the best-selling novel by Billie Letts.
Having lived her entire life in a trailer, Novalee Nation is a pregnant, superstitious and uneducated seventeen year old. With the exception of her boyfriend and the unborn baby's father Willie Jack Pickens, she is all alone in the world with no money of her own. On the drive from their current home in Tennessee to Bakersfield, California where they are planning on moving, Willie Jack abandons Novalee in the small town of Sequoyah, Oklahoma. With no food or money, Novalee ends up secretly living in the town's Wal-Mart. As her stay in Sequoyah is extended, Novalee is befriended and ultimately assisted by a variety of townsfolk, including a recovering alcoholic named Sister Husband, single mother and nurse Lexi Coop who names her children after snack foods, WalMart's contract photographer named Moses Whitecotten, and the temporary librarian named Forney Hull, an academically brilliant man originally from New England. As much as they help Novalee, she in turn has a profound affect on them as each is dealing with an issue which stops them from having a truly fulfilled life. Forney ends up falling in love with Novalee, who feels she has to make a decision of how she can best help him. She is assisted in this decision by an unlikely source.
A pregnant teen goes on the road with her dreamer boy friend, who abandons her in a Wal-Mart store in Oklahoma. Left alone with virtually no money, she hides out in the store for 6 weeks until her baby is born. After the birth, she gets national recognition as giving birth to the "Wal-mart baby". She makes friends with two local women (Stockard Channing as a religious, but promiscious woman & Ashley Judd as a woman with a pile of kids, who also seems to have considerable man problems until she marries the local exterminator). She also becomes friends with the Wal-mart photographer, who leads her to a career, and with a young man who runs the library and takes her of his alcoholic sister, who is the real librarian.
Novalee Nation, 17 and very pregnant, has never been part of a real home. The closest thing to family for the hard-luck teen is her selfish, would-be musician boyfriend, Willy Jack, with whom she's traveling from Tennessee to California in a rust bucket that used to be a Plymouth. A bathroom stop en route, at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart, changes Novalee's life forever. For when she leaves the store, she discovers that Willy Jack and the Plymouth are gone. Only her Polaroid camera remains in the parking space. Alone and broke, Novalee surreptitiously moves into the vast store, borrowing food and supplies from its shelves. When she gives birth on the floor - and her hideaway is revealed - Novalee and her "Wal-Mart Baby" become instant celebrities. More importantly, over the next few years, Novalee finally becomes part of an unconventional, makeshift family comprised of her wonderfully eccentric new friends. Now, with the family she always wanted, Novalee is transformed from a homeless teen to a successful and strong woman. She has finally found a home in this small town where fate has dropped her.
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