Alma, the main character, lives in Buenos Aires with her parents and goes every weekend to their house in the Delta. She makes friends with Carmen and Marito there. Carmen and Marito are islanders and live across a stream with their grandmother Doña Ángela.

These three friends share their childhood adventures in the wild and lonely landscape of paradise. The constant river, with its power to swallow any living creature into its depths, is their fishing realm one day and turns against them the next.

Alma innocently handles the duality between these weekend friends and her life in the city with her parents, their social differences, her future possibilities as opposed to the difficulties that lie ahead in her friends’ lives once childhood is over. They are oblivious of the future. They build houses on the trees; they dream their own universe and spy the mysteries of the adult world around them.

Tordo, Carmen and Marito’s uncle, does not approve of this friendship. His grim personality fascinates and scares Alma and his love affair with a twenty years older rich hungarian who spends her weekends upstream is the centre of Alma’s and Carmen’s teenage speculations.

Their friendship is threatened by the changes time brings. In the first teenage years Alma falls in love with Marito but her social life belongs in the city with her school mates. She doesn’t like her school mates; she doesn’t feel she belongs with them. It’s the seventies and the military coup takes over the country. Alma tries to socialize in a group of people who chooses to ignore the political situation.