The novel’s action occurs in two timeframes: during the childhood of the protagonist, Nomi Nickel, and during her adolescence in the late 1970s. Nomi is born into the conservative Mennonite community of East Village, Canada, where her parents, Ray and Trudie, have lived all their lives. A middle school teacher, Ray is a devout but mild-mannered Mennonite. He admires and adores Trudie, who is warm and spontaneous but often contravenes Mennonite norms in a way that makes him anxious. Nomi also has a bossy but kind older sister, Tash.
Nomi’s life is largely controlled by the seemingly archaic rules that govern Mennonite society. She can only wear certain kinds of clothes, and she’s not supposed to dance or hug people at school. When she asks permission to go to the movies, Trudie spends an afternoon deciding if it’s appropriate. Yet Nomi characterizes her family life as happy and satisfying, remembering lake outings with her parents and Tash and the comforting feeling over going to sleep listening to her mother and sister playing cards. At school, she has a close friend named Lids, with whom she walks home every day.
Even as a young child, Nomi sees other members of her family questioning the norms of Mennonite society. Trudie passively resists conformity by refusing to do many of the things expected of Mennonite women, like performing chores at the church and sending supplies to missionaries. On Sundays, when Trudie is assigned to take care of babies during church services, she unplugs the speaker piping the sermon into her room and lets Tash play forbidden American radio stations instead. While Mennonite women are expected to be scrupulous housekeepers, Trudie is haphazard and untidy; she spends most of her time reading, an activity frowned upon in the community.
Tash is much more explicit in her rebellion: she carries her radio everywhere, wears clothes deemed inappropriate by the church, and “educates” Nomi on sex and sexuality, topics that no one else in the community discusses. She encourages Nomi to mock church elders, like Trudie’s brother, the preacher, whom they impiously nickname The Mouth for his pompous sermons. However, as a child Nomi herself believes wholeheartedly in Mennonite principles. She loves participating in Sunday school games in which the class pretends to kick people out of Heaven for sinning, and she eagerly looks forward to an afterlife of eternal bliss with her family. One of her deepest fears is that Tash will be condemned to Hell for her various transgressions.
As Nomi grows up, Tash becomes more and more openly defiant of church norms. She refuses to attend church and spends most of her time in her room, burning incense and listening to records; she won’t even talk and play with Nomi as she once did. More troublingly, Tash and her boyfriend Ian have started borrowing library books from the nearest city and are reading about philosophy and communism, activities that Nomi realizes are much more threatening than the clothes Tash wears. Hoping it’s a phase, Trudie and Ray ignore Tash’s behavior, but it’s hard to do so when she starts staying out all night and The Mouth constantly chastises her for failing to conform. Eventually, Tash declares that she has become an atheist and is going to leave town with Ian. Trudie supports her in this decision, packing clothes and food for her journey. Tash finally becomes friendly to Nomi again, and bequeaths her record collection to her younger sister. But Ray, devastated and concerned, won’t even say goodbye.
After Tash’s departure Nomi’s home life becomes erratic and unsettled. Ray and Trudie are both despondent and often cry in the middle of the day. Trudie starts wandering the town at night in her pajamas, and her behavior becomes more openly contrary to Mennonite norms. Nomi becomes obsessed with the idea of Tash’s eternal damnation, and dreams that her sister is burning in Hell every night. One night, frustrated with these recurring nightmares, Trudie marches Nomi to The Mouth’s house and demands that the preacher tell her that Tash will be “saved.” Sticking to his dogma, The Mouth refuses to do so, and Trudie flies into a fury in front of his house, screaming profanities and throwing stones. Shortly after that, Trudie leaves the family as well, without saying goodbye to Nomi.
The story shifts into the future, when Nomi is sixteen and living with Ray in the family’s bungalow. Shell-shocked by the departure of his wife and daughter, Ray has become extremely apathetic. He lets the house become decrepit and leaves Nomi to do laundry and cook to the best of her ability. Meanwhile, Nomi has lost confidence in her faith and taken up Tash’s iconoclastic tendencies. She wears her sister’s clothes and burns her incense; and like Tash, she feels both amused and oppressed by the inconsistencies and absurdities of life within a highly religious community.
Instead of participating in church-sanctioned activities, Nomi hangs out at a sewage pit where the town’s rebellious teens gather to share beer and joints. It’s here that Nomi meets Travis, a boy her own age who has dropped out of high school and works in the town’s museum, role-playing as a Mennonite pioneer. Nomi and Travis immediately bond over their love of rock music, and start going out. Almost every night, Travis picks Nomi up in his truck and they drive around the town’s outskirts, laying naked in the fields or going swimming or visiting the local drug dealer, The Comb, to buy weed. Travis wants to have sex and, although she’s less certain, Nomi makes an appointment to get birth control from a doctor. However, Travis often tells Nomi what to do and they frequently quarrel, usually when Travis’s behavior reveals him to be less committed to their relationship than Nomi wants. For example, he often talks about escaping to Montreal, but will never specify if he wants Nomi to come with him.
While Nomi’s keen eye for humor shows her intelligence and creativity, she gets increasingly bad grades at school because of her refusal to parrot Mennonite dogma. In particular, she often quarrels with her English teacher, Mr. Quiring. Mr. Quiring demands that his students write formulaic stories that reinforce traditional ideas, while Nomi’s rambling narratives often question them. He frequently throws her out of class, which she uses as an excuse to skip school entirely and walk around the town. Nomi’s wanderings show her the bleaker parts of town, such as the billboards that threaten citizens with damnation if they don’t follow the church. She also encounters people who have been “excommunicated” by the church and now live in the town even though everyone else is obliged to shun them. But the walks also build unlikely friendships: Nomi is close to an elderly widow, Mrs. Peters, and spends time visiting her house and doing chores, and she always takes time to play charades and other games with the little neighbor girl who lives next to her.
She also frequently goes to the hospital, where Lids is now languishing because of an undiagnosed chronic illness. While Lids is a devout Mennonite, she listens uncritically and supportively as Nomi discusses her relationship with Travis and her plans to have sex. The nurses are often unsympathetic and neglectful, but Nomi takes over their duties, cheering Lids up and performing difficult chores like washing her hair. Nomi even throws a can of orange juice at a mean nurse who refuses to give Lids the special kind of food that she needs. The nurse retaliates by saying Nomi is as crazy as her mother. Allusions like this cause Nomi to reveal to the reader that Trudie left the community not randomly, but after being excommunicated by The Mouth, her own brother.
Although Ray is unhappy about Nomi’s failure to attend school, he never reprimands her strongly. Instead, he helps her to prepare for her driving test. He himself is becoming more erratic, gradually selling off most of the furniture so that that the house lacks basic items like a sofa and a refrigerator. He also takes to driving around for hours every night. Nomi is worried about his well-being, especially since she can’t move to Montreal with Travis if her father can’t take care of himself.
After Nomi obtains birth control from a sympathetic doctor, she and Travis have sex. But it’s far less romantic than Nomi expected: drunk and vulnerable, she wants Travis to ask her to move to Montreal and is upset when he fails to do so. In the following weeks, Nomi becomes dependent on intoxicants, spending most of her time trying to scrounge up money to buy marijuana.
Then, in one fateful night, Nomi’s various problems come to a head. She finds out that Travis, has been cheating on her with his fake “wife” at the village museum, Adeline. In retaliation, Nomi finds Travis’s truck parked outside a motel where he’s having a tryst and sets it on fire. Then she goes to the hospital to seek consolation from Lids, only to find that her friend has been moved to a psychiatric facility to receive shock therapy. Distraught, Nomi makes her way to The Comb’s trailer, where she gets drunk with the drug dealer. She blacks out and wakes up to find she’s had sex with The Comb; it’s never clear if the sex is consensual. Nomi takes a joint from him and drives to the town dump to smoke it. It’s here that Ray finds her. He gives her a muffin and drives her home, but before she has time to clean up The Mouth arrives and announces that Nomi has been excommunicated for setting fires and disobeying the rules.
Barely reacting to The Mouth’s pronouncement, Ray tells Nomi to go to bed. When she wakes up, she finds he has gone for good, leaving her the car. In a loving note, he instructs Nomi to sell the house and says they’ll meet again in a few years. He closes with several beautiful Biblical verses about God’s constant presence and the prospect of achieving joy in the future. As she packs up her few possessions. Nomi is deeply grateful to Ray for realizing that, in order for her to break free of the town, he must leave as well.
Nomi begins to address Mr. Quiring directly, telling him that she’s submitting this narrative instead of her required final assignment. She reveals to the reader that she discovered, several months ago, several letters from Mr. Quiring in Trudie’s dresser, which revealed that they had been having an affair before Trudie’s departure. The first letters are romantic and passionate, but after Trudie ends the affair he writes letters threatening to expose her as an “adulteress” before the entire town. Nomi doesn’t know if Trudie ended the affair because of her love for Ray or simply her desire to leave town, but Nomi doesn’t care. Nomi’s story ends with her sitting in her empty room, “wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town.”
