I shelf-to-shelfed, extracting book after book, the opening of each a sneezery of dust.
You, the reader, don't know what's real and what's imagined by the utterly unreliable narrator of this tale, an orphaned young girl who, forbidden to learn how to read, teaches herself and develops her own way of speaking. She goes to extraordinary lengths to keep her younger brother by her side and her conduct raises questions about the agency of children and what responsibility they bear for their actions. As in life, there are loose ends aplenty and no clear answers to either the factual or philosophical questions which arise.