Fifteen-year-old Camilla Dickinson narrates an important period of her life spanning approximately three weeks in November 1950.

Camilla lives on Park Avenue in New York City with her wealthy parents Rose, who is beautiful yet irresponsible and overdramatic, and Rafferty, a stern, responsible architect.

The quiet, thoughtful and undramatic Camilla dreams of becoming an astronomer, but must deal with the constant ups and downs of her parents' troubled marriage.

Camilla's new best friend, Luisa Rowan, has parents with a similarly dysfunctional marriage who fight constantly and seem likely to get a divorce.

Frank and Camilla have deep conversations about life, religion, philosophy, growing up, and dealing with difficult situations, and the pair begin to form a romantic attachment, much to the chagrin of Luisa.

While Camilla is heartbroken by the loss of her closest relationships, she uses the inner strength she has gained in the past weeks to deal with the changes in her life.

Throughout the novel Camilla starts out as this naive sheltered child, but as the story progresses, she moves from her innocent state as she experiences and discovers the world around her.

Rose Dickinson is feeling the loss of her beauty with age, and it scares her because that is such a large part of her identity and foundation of who she is, what is she without it?

An adaptation of the novel was made into a film written and directed by Cornelia Moore, featuring Adelaide Clemens as Camilla Dickinson, Gregg Sulkin as Frank Rowan, Cary Elwes as Rafferty and Samantha Mathis as Rose.

Rose Dickinson continues her promiscuous and irresponsible behavior; Camilla and Frank Rowan (who becomes a publisher) are shown to have later resumed their friendship, but not their romantic relationship, and they marry other people.

Frank Rowan appears very briefly in L'Engle's 1984 novel A House Like a Lotus, as a publisher in Istanbul whose wife was killed in an automobile accident, in which he also lost one leg.