Thirty-two year old Rachel Shattuck has not returned to Snow Island since she attended her mother’s funeral. A year later, in the summer of 1965, she remains frightened of what she will confront at home: her mother’s absence, her father’s stern nature, and the unrealized promise of her own life now that she is divorced.

When she returns to Snow Island to care for her father after he is injured in an accident, she discovers her mother’s diaries, hidden in the house where she died a year earlier. What Rachel learns through reading her mother’s diary and becoming an islander once again reveals the truth about her family’s history and sets her own troubled life on a new course.