Melanie Finn's novel follows Rosie Monroe from a suffocating Massachusetts childhood through 1980s New York art school to rural Vermont, where she must confront the consequences of choices made when she was too young to understand them. Rosie escapes her strict grandmother for art school, where she falls for Bennett, a charming con man who promises adventure and delivers exploitation. Their schemes end with Rosie abandoned in a Vermont village with a child, no money, and no way back to the life she imagined. The novel moves between past and present, revealing how Rosie arrived at her predicament while showing her attempts to build something from wreckage. Finn writes about poverty and survival with unglamorous precision: the calculations required to stretch food stamps, the humiliation of dependence, the weight of bad decisions compounding over years. Rosie is not likeable in conventional terms--she lies, manipulates, and often fails to protect those who depend on her--but Finn creates understanding without excusing. The Vermont landscape, harsh and beautiful, mirrors Rosie's situation: survival requires clear-eyed acceptance of conditions as they are. The novel explores how women become trapped by love, poverty, and the choices that seemed like freedom when they were made.