The novel deals with sibling rivalry, parental love, adult irrationality, and is a coming-of-age story about two young girls struggling with the powerful changes in their bodies and minds.

[1][2] It was originally published in 1988 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

[3] John Crowley, reviewing the novel in 1988, wrote, "Kathryn Davis has taken the sad and binding stuff of many a first novel - the inescapable family, the growth into knowledge, the heavy burden of physical life and the queasy processes of becoming - and fashioned genuinely new embodiments for it.

"[2] Michiko Kakutani, also reviewing the novel for The New York Times, wrote, "Ms. Davis demonstrates a formidable talent for capturing the savage confusions of youth.

She is able to map out the fuzzy frontiers that exist in a child's mind between reality and fantasy and in doing so also to convey the perils of childhood and adolescence -both the real and the imagined.