The story focuses on Nicole Gunther, an American woman in the 1990s, who is dissatisfied with her hectic life, which includes balancing her career as a lawyer with being a mother and dealing with her deadbeat ex-husband and sexist coworkers. Believing the past was a better time, one evening, after a particularly wild day, she makes a wish before a plaque of two Roman gods, Liber and Libera. The next morning, she finds herself waking up in the body of one of her ancient ancestors in 2nd-century Carnuntum in what is now Austria. In general, she finds out the hard way that life in the past was not quite what she thought it would be: slavery taken for granted, no women's rights, no effective medicine or clean medical practices, and no tampons. Over the course of a year, she is forced to revise