So much had happened to her and the world that fifteen-year-old Julie had learned not to be upset the way a young girl who had grown up in the regular way in a regular place would have been. Her idyllic childhood in Malaya seemed like a dream, or rather, a recurring nightmare, for she would never forget that terrible night she and her mother had been forced to flee the burning city of Singapore. Now, ten years later, she was returning to a father she scarcely knew and to a strange boy who had been her childhood playmate. Would she find the paradise she remembered, or had the terrible war swept away forever all that she had known and loved?