"Strife is what happens while you are busy making other plans." We are never so certain as to what we want out of life as when we are young - too young to realize that fate has other ideas. Trevor Middleton, an ambulance driver serving in France with the AAFS during WWI, dreams of flying with the newly formed Escadrille Américaine, a squadron of American rather than French pilots. When Trevor is severely injured in the line of duty, he instead finds himself convalescing in the remote mountains of North Carolina. In those same remote mountains, Annie Conner, the daughter of a subsistence farmer who also serves as the hellfire and brimstone-spitting preacher at the local Pentecostal church, dreams of a better life - one where she is free from poverty and her father's tyranny. Years of abuse and neglect blind her to the fact that she alone holds the power to escape. When the paths of these two young and headstrong people collide, their tempestuous relationship, borne out of mutual pain and confusion, sets up the perfect storm - a storm which will reshape the mountains themselves and forever transform the lives of those who remain when the raging waters recede.