Seven-year-old Viola packs a suitcase and climbs a floating staircase into the sky. She soon discovers that her journey will unite her past, present, and future into a fanciful adventure, part life and part dream.

A young woman from the Midwest gets more than she bargained for when she moves to New York to become a writer and ends up as the assistant to the tyrannical, larger-than-life editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine.