It's sometime in the 1970's. Fifteen year old loner Agnes Marie Pottie - nicknamed Mooney - dreams of escaping life in New Waterford, a coastal Nova Scotia town on Cape Breton Island. She has quiet contempt for most of the people around her - including her large family - who don't share her sensibilities. They, who are ruled by Catholic mores, in turn think she's unconventional and weird. She thinks she's realized her dream when, with the help of her teacher Cecil Sweeney, who himself has escaped to New Waterford to find himself (at which he has been unsuccessful so far), she has been awarded a scholarship to attend an art school in New York. Her dreams are temporarily dashed when her parents don't allow her to go. She devises a plan to get out of New Waterford, one that goes against her loner status.