Strange, dark, swirling and beautiful ruminations on adolescence, solitude, family legacies, a child's widening consciousness of the world and the struggle to understand loss and abandonment. The backdrop of the small, rural, uncompromisingly conservative town of Fingerbone set against a bare wintry landscape is the story's counterpart in stark, raw beauty: Ruthie's voice is wine-dark and lake-deep, ponderous with poetic lines and protean metaphors that slide and shift from one sentiment to the next, mimicking the rocking of a boat out in the water, savouring emotion with sincere wonder and piercing insight. Although her unambitious account begins very early, predating her childhood, and ends with her as a young woman of the world, it is difficult to imagine her as a child, or even one that lives among indifferent domestic mess with her aunt Sylvie as housekeeper, or someone aimless, taking up odd jobs to pass the time, devoid of human drive. Rather she gives the impression of a poet, wise beyond her years and quietly observant of everyone around her, drenching her bildungsroman in water and light, returning repeatedly to key formative events that jostle with others, just as waves continually bring drifting articles back to the shore. Perhaps the story tackles the question: 'what does it mean to drift?' Drifting positively connotes freedom, variety (Sylvie's stories about other people), detaching oneself from the consequences of the past and its emotional valences, but drifting also risks meaninglessness - Sylvie's life and stories are seemingly devoid of any greater significance or value beyond what they are, and they stand in contrast to Lucille's energetic, angrily desperate attempts to break out of their lives, to do things, to make (a dress), to distinguish herself and have a life of her own, even if it means being like the other young people in the town.