Judy is eight years old when her world begins to crumble. Her beloved older sister Hilda is getting married, and suddenly the girl who was once Judy's entire universe has eyes only for Jasper Quentyns. In the quaint village where they've lived together, Judy watches helplessly as her sister transforms into someone who belongs to another. When the wedding sends Hilda to a new home, Judy is transplanted too - sent to live with the newlyweds in a house where she is neither wanted nor welcomed. The husband is a conscientious man with no patience for a sulking, jealous child. Judy, 'the young mutineer,' fights back the only way she knows how: with stubborn silence, with petty rebellions, with a broken heart she cannot articulate. But a crisis eventually forces a reckoning, and the mutineer must find a way to surrender. L. T. Meade understood something essential about childhood's rawest fears - the terror of being replaced, of no longer mattering to the people who once made the world feel safe. This is a portrait of jealousy stripped of sentiment, rendered with Victorian frankness.
