The story of Katherine Forrester, an imaginative and intensely creative young American girl who yearns to become a concert pianist, as was her mother. As she learns how to accept the conflicts of her unorthodox home life and then her fellow students in a boarding school in Switzerland, we follow Katherine through all the torment, loneliness, and adorations and passions of a fifteen-year-old girl as she tries to realize her ambitions in the tumultuous world of the arts and make her own way to maturity.
Note: this book is an excerpt of L'Engle's first book The Small Rain, and was reissued for teenagers (the original is an adult novel).