“Rukeyser’s assured, elegant prose brings colour and outline to the great outdoors … Her debut novel is part adventure story, party coming of age tale, about a woman on the cusp of adulthood, fully of inchoate longing. If moving a character to a foreign world in order to bring about a transformation is a time-word staple of fiction writers, Rukeyser takes that old trick and flies her reader off to a brave new world.”