Jade Marie lives on a farm with her mother and father. Tom, the farmhand, is the only other, almost permanent, person who is usually around. She is in her last year at school, and the future doesn't hold much hope for her. Relationships have become increasingly strained, and her father, especially, had begun to have little to do with her. She loves the outdoors where she can escape into the fields, with only the animals as her companions, and spends much time in her own company. Falling deeper into herself, she steadily increases her isolation from others.At school, she doesn't fare much better, as the difficulties of her home life are affecting her ability to foster good friendships. Her natural aloofness is the subject of much ridicule by the Tuesday Boys, the miscreants of the class, but she is considered with curiosity and compassion by a single admirer, whose attentions she feels unable to return.While walking back from the village with her mother, one, early Spring evening, she finds a doll that had been carelessly abandoned in a builders' skip. Retrieving it, she takes it home, and is convinced that it was instrumental in saving both her own and her mother's life by the river bank, as a brief, but vicious rainstorm took part of the precarious path away.The doll, which she calls Skipdoll, becomes her best friend and, from that day, events which take place in her life, and which are often threatening, could be explained by the presence of the doll, as all events or their solutions, could be traced back to it.In the moment of perhaps her deepest despair, the reasons for the strained relationships at home are revealed to her, leaving her with the potential to turn her life around to a happy one, if she has the skills to engage with others
