When Miranda Hodge goes to Tasmania to stay with her ex-half-sister-in-law Blossom at Blossom's gloriously eccentric cafe in Mariners Bay, she expects that she'll be helping out with the cleaning and the dishes. Miranda is used to being dumped on. But what she finds is something quite different: the knowledge that she, Miranda, is someone whose ideas matter.
Mariners Bay turns out to be a place where once there were mermaids; a place where, if you have the right attitude, magical things can happen. When an ill-conceived tourism development threatens to destroy its tranquility, and Blossom faces bankruptcy, it's Miranda's fascination with the story of the mermaids that turns things around at last.