Fourteen-year-old Hilde, raised on a family farm in Wisconsin, is dragged to the northern California coastal town of Pescadero by a mother fleeing a bad marriage.
But Pescadero is worlds away from the conservative Midwest, and Hilde finds herself adrift in a community where all the attitudes she absorbed growing up seem oddly off-key.
When her mother hires an undocumented farmworker to tend the goat farm the family is trying to revive, Hilde strikes up an unlikely friendship with him and learns of his plan to bring his brother across the Border. But the brother's journey turns calamitous, and Hilde soon becomes engulfed in its harrowing aftermath.