Life seems to be one step forward, two steps back, but Katie never gives up hope. When she is only a girl, her handsome but wicked father, Lewis, is imprisoned for theft, leaving Katie and her mother homeless and penniless. When Lewis is released years later, it seems that life must improve. But to Katies? horror, it becomes worse than she has ever known it. When she and her father are left alone together, Katie seeks happiness and love elsewhere but, as she struggles to make a new life for herself, there is difficulty and danger at every turn.