Sixteen-year-old apprentice Zuzka commutes to Prague, where she is studying to become a "mechanic and agricultural machinery adjuster." She lives alternately at a boarding school and at her parents' farm. At home, endless work awaits her, and at school, she is constantly ridiculed by her classmates. Only at night, in the girls' dormitory, under the covers, can she live out her dreams of love. She is secretly and platonically in love with actor and singer Jiří Pavel, about whom she knows everything. She keeps a scrapbook diary in which she records all of Pavel's acting and singing successes.

Marie violates tradition in a small German town of Lauscha, to become the first female glassblower in in 1890. Her glass ball decorations find a new market in America.