In the 1970s, Shelagh Plunkett, a teenage girl from Vancouver, travels with her middle-class family to Guyana and Indonesia, where her father, a civil engineer, has been posted to help with those countries’ water systems. On the surface, she lives a protected life, attending girls’ schools run by nuns and surrounded by household staff. But there is also a fearlessness and recklessness in the girl—a hotel tryst at fifteen, swimming with piranhas, and cavorting with monkeys.