A courageous story of lost innocence and luminous promise. This spirited literary debut pulls you into a world of ongoing suspense and fascination. With each vivid detail and image, Tracie, the twelve-year old heroine, evokes powerful remembrance of what it is to be a child. Her strong, steady and delightful voice, will touch your heart, bringing you to tears, laughter, or both. Tracie lives in a tangled world of relationships that are both tender and cruel. Her large, chaotic, Catholic family owns and operates a motel, with cows in the back pasture, on the outskirts of a small, dusty town in the late 1950's. Tracie is surrounded by poverty and chaos and relentlessly searches for ways to wash away the sins on her soul. Her Mom and Grandmother are at war over religion, while Tracie has her own private visions and dreams that defy religion. She speculates and is fiercely determined to find out what really happened when her mother was hospitalized for a breakdown. What was her Grandmother doing with all that voodoo and magic? What would happen after the atomic bomb fell and they had to live in their bomb shelter? And what happens at the exact moment you die? She wants to know why boys are such pigs with their game of canning rats. And why doesn't her Mom care that her oldest brother beats on her? She wonders why the "playboys" in Unit 5 hang up girlie pictures and what will happen to their souls? Tracie is terrified by some of her questions and what she will discover, but is determined to find answers and to solve her emotional dilemmas. She is disturbed and excited by the dangerous feelings that erupt in her body. But she defies danger, is guided by her evocative dreams, and persists at all cost, in trying to figure out the unfathomable.