[1][2] Initially she attends an ordinary high school, where she is alienated from her peers, who don't understand her angst, her rejection of fashionable clothes.

She experiences unwelcome attention from a male teacher, and when she tries to retaliate, she is the one who is punished, being sent to a Roman Catholic high school.

Her dream of running away to New York City, to meet her hero, John Lennon, is the narrative arc that cements the story.

[3] Ray Robertson praised the novel's sparse narrative style, writing: "Whereas a less plot-conscious writer might have let Marnie marinate for 140 pages in her own emotional juices, stewing in the sop of her oh-so-sensitive soul, Zeitoun cleverly uses Marnie's obsession with meeting Lennon as a simple but effective storyline to hang a series of witty observations about the life of a properly alienated teenager.

"[2] Quill and Quire wrote: "First-time novelist Mary-Lou Zeitoun's 13 wryly evokes an unavoidable time and place in everyone's life – the teenage years – without rendering the experience into saccharine nostalgia.