A year's stay on small Ajax Island in northern Puget Sound provides some right solutions for 16-year-old Maggie Jerrold, her emotionally upset mother and Jody Roberts, a new young school teacher. Maggie's mother, a 'war widow, was happily remarried to Joe Neville only to have tragedy strike again when her second child died of polio. Joe, sensing that his island childhood home would be the best place for his wife to recuperate from a bad nervous breakdown, sends her off with Maggie. There they meet Jody, Sven Solquist, young member of the school board, and the Jessups with whom they are to live. A year of discovering that life need not be lonely, even on a small island, brings romance and marriage to Jody and Sven and a new future for Maggie, her nice stepfather and her fully recovered mother. A change and a cure.