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.