Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey --- especially for seven-year-old Antoinette (nicknamed “Toni”) and her brother, Jack. However, both their father and Jack face the dangers of war, while their mother has ambitions of her own --- and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other --- and to Palisades Park --- until the park closes forever in 1971.

This is the story of a young “picture bride” who journeys to Hawai'i in 1914 in search of a better life. But instead of the affluent young husband that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife. Renaming herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice.