Eleven year old Allegra shuttles between her next-door grandmothers while her shadow of a father listens to the races in the flat out the back. Each lives in a separate adult world. Holocaust survivor Matilde works all hours as a seamstress and instills discipline and duty.
She insists Allegra will study Medicine. Meanwhile free-spirited Joy is full of color, possibility and emotion, riding the second wave of the women's movement along with her tortoise, Simone de Beauvoir. She wants Ally to be liberated and explore her 'true essence'. And her father Rick, still grieving the loss of her mother, imparts wisps of wisdom between catching waves and listening to horse races in his flat above the garage. Stuck in the middle of a fractured family, Allegra wishes her relatives loved her a little less and liked each other a little more. Until one day, the unspoken tragedy that's created this division explodes within the person they all cherish most.
