A young southern family moves from the hills of small-town West Virginia to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1939 and enters a new social stratum. After struggling to fit into a private girl's high school, the daughter attends a western college, where she suffers staggering defeat and enters a relationship that sets her on a singular path. Striving to carve out her identity within the rigid moral codes of the conventional Forties and Fifties, she defiantly pushes the front edge of the emerging hippy protest movements. The demands of academia, isolation, and personal relationships teach her that there's a price to pay for freedom.