When a recklessly idealistic girl in a dystopian future society dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled world, she is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America – ‘Wainscotia, Wisconsin’ – that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town, she is set upon a course of ‘rehabilitation’ – but she falls in love with a fellow exile and starts to question the constraints of her new existence, with results that are both devastating and liberating.