A youth’s quiet rebellion seventeen-year-old Monika has been abandoned by her mother. It is the summer before her final year of high school, and she is placed in the custody of her father, but the relationship between father and daughter is strained. Monika spends the summer at a little lodge in the mountains, meeting distant family members from her mother’s side and discovering her roots. She comes to understand what is truly important to her, and decides not to return to school in the fall. Her father does not approve, and Monika defies his wishes. But Monika is perhaps not as abandoned and alone as she had thought. Eva Jensen’s short coming-of-age novel is a wise and touching description of a youth dealing with expectations and pressures from parents who themselves have not always acted responsibly.