Victorine is thirteen, and she can't get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexu
al body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is
a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more
than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine's older brother Costello is struggling to
hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L'Ho
mmedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming aban
don even as Allison, his wife, drifts through life in a narcotic daze.
