She's seven years old, she's just lost her stepfather, and the whole town is debating her future before the funeral flowers have wilted. Mary-'Gusta is a strange, perceptive child, the kind who retreats to secret places when the world grows too loud, and in the wake of Marcellus Hall's death, the adults of her Cape Cod community descend upon her fate like seagulls to a fishing dock. They call her queer. They call her difficult. They wonder who will take her in, who will bear the burden of this unusual girl. But Mary-'Gusta knows exactly who she is, and as the town deliberates in parlors and newspaper offices, she climbs to her favorite perch above it all, watching the waves and the gulls and the boats that will carry her anywhere, or nowhere. Joseph Crosby Lincoln writes with quiet devastation about the particular loneliness of childhood: the way adults speak over you, around you, about you, while you sit silent and see everything. This is a novel about what it means to be misunderstood by everyone tasked with caring for you, and the stubborn, quiet resilience of a girl who refuses to be anything other than herself.
