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.