When her father, an ex-soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, is arrested for murder, Emily's efforts to exonerate him take her into the woods to play the Game, an extreme version of childhood games.

Moss lives alone with her magician father and a dog on a magical island, until a tempest sweeps a wild, not-quite-human boy, Callan, onto its beaches, and the two grow close, despite her father's worries--and then one day, a young man from the outside world is shipwrecked on her island, and after that nothing will be the same again.