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I love her with all my childish heart even though I am still small enough to fear her. Sometimes I also hate her. She says she loves me because I'm her daughter but she doesn't like me. I think I would prefer it to be the other way around but I can't decide which is better. From her very beginning, when Suzan is adopted in the late 1960s, she is set on a collision course with her adoptive mother and with polite Pietermaritzburg society. Suzan grabs her childhood life with unrestrained zeal - an exuberance that is barely tolerated by her mother, and which spirals into rebellion, landing her in a place of safety at the age of thirteen. As a ward of the state, Suzan fights to survive in an underworld of drugs and prostitution. She tells her story with a sometimes tender, often angry, frequently funny eye in this engrossing tale of a singular childhood.