Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

Madeleine Hanna, writing her senior thesis on the marriage plot of the great English novels, enrolls in a semiotics course and falls in love with Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic loner, but Mitchell Grammaticus also resurfaces obsessed with the idea Madeleine is destined to be his mate.