Lion West, Jr., Violet’s grandson, is a soldier in Europe at the end of World War II, liberating Hitler’s concentration camps. Visiting the camps, Lion falls in love with his female guide. This is problematic because he’s already engaged and set to marry when he returns to Boston to assume his position as a mathematics professor at Harvard. However, the more he gets to know this guide, Dorey, the more he realizes that his original plan will never come to fruition. She enchants him, and Lion soaks up her stories of the trickery and ingenuity used to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust. Not long after meeting her, Lion proposes to Dorey, and she accepts.

After marrying in Berlin, the couple returns to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lion knows that they must visit his grandmother at her house on Cape Cod because her opinion is of utmost importance to him. He dreads this visit, however, because he fears he has waited too long to introduce Dorey to his grandmother. To prepare for the visit, Violet sets a series of hazards to test Lion’s new wife: disgusting food, uncomfortable seats, stones in her coffee cup, and a beehive in their attic bedroom. Violet does this out of love for her grandson, a love matched only by her love for his father.