Leaving is better than arriving. In 1914, fleeing an unhappy affair, illustrator Nola Lynch sails from New York through the Panama Canal to California. Alone. The Panama Canal has just opened after tortuous years in the making and the United States swells with price and invincibility. In Mexico, revolution rages between plantation owners and the peons. And movie makers flee New York for the ease of shooting motion pictures in dry, sunny Hollywoodland. Nola anticipates romance, excitement, adventure, and she finds it all, starting with a ship-board magician with a dark secret and in a séance gone horribly wrong. When a shipwreck changes the course of her life, Nola becomes the hostage of a Mexican revolutionary who is not what she expects, and his brutal brother who is everything fearful. After her release, she is rescued by people enticed into the chaos of motion pictures making and makes her way to Los Angeles. Can a single woman alone in a rapidly changing United States find the strength to survive? Or will society and propriety defeat her personal freedom in the end?