The author "tells the story of Katherine Forrester, an imaginative and intensely creative young American girl who yearns to become a concert pianist, as was her mother. As she learns how to accept the conflicts of her unorthodox home life and then her fellow students in a boarding school in Switzerland, we follow Katherine through all the torment, loneliness, and adorations and passions of a fifteen-year-old girl as she tries to realize her ambitions in the tumultuous world of the arts and make her own way to maturity.