Young Maggie Scanlan begins to sense that, beneath the calm everyday surface of her peaceful life, everything is going strangely wrong. Her all-powerful grandfather is reduced to a shadow by a stroke, and to Maggie's astonishment this causes her usually unemotional father to burst into tears. Connie, her lushly beautiful mother, whom Maggie could always be sure of finding at home, is now rarely there. And her cousin and her best friend start doing things that leave her confused and frightened about sex and sin. In the sprawling Scanlan family in New York's Westchester County in the '60s, accommodations are made within a culturally mixed marriage and the mundanity of married life is validated by the occasional flare of passion. Maggie observes the powerplay and shifting allegiances operating behind the scenes with the sharp and dispassionate view of a child on the verge of adulthood. A troubling, frightening time, it ultimately becomes one of liberation, an object lesson Maggie will remember for the rest of her life.