Lucy's family is excited to spend the summer in Bar Harbor, Maine. Her minister father is pleased to preside over such a prestigious congregation, and his social-climbing wife is ecstatic at the chance to find a rich husband for her daughter. Yet Lucy wants nothing to do with the Bar Harbor social scene; she's simply excited to spend the summer by the sea, watching the waves from her favourite spot on the cliff. Despite having never gone swimming, Lucy feels an intense connection to the ocean, and meets a handsome ship-builder who shows Lucy a world she's never known, yet somehow always longed for. However, her mother will stop at nothing to keep Lucy and the ship-builder apart, even if it means throwing Lucy into the arms of a wealthy man with a dangerous secret. Can Lucy break free and embrace her destiny as a daughter of the sea? Or is she doomed to waste away in a gilded cage, slowly dying of a broken heart?