Eleanor Leydon is a rebel, and the foster parents she's currently living with (her parents were killed in a car accident) are middle-class Catholics, and she feels stifled. Rejecting their conservative world, she becomes a stonemason and seeks solace in a forbidden love affair which only entraps her further. She gets some help from two women friends. Their travels to France and Greece initiate sexual rivalries and desire, and create a need in Eleanor to find some kind of peace and reconciliation within herself. Maguire's is a powerful vision of the emotional, spiritual, and social impulses that drive our lives.