This is the story of Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, who comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor's family in Kitchener, Ontario, during the Depression. Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic wife, Cammy, an alcoholic, and their two demanding but affectionate children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences such as running water, wringer washing machines, and Hoovers. She wears expensive clothes cast off by Cammy and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. Her world explodes open in her new surroundings, and when Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person. While caring for her own family, Lexi finds a diary written by her older brother during the family's journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one that reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Kitchener, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realisation that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny. "Watermelon Syrup" is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities.