Kim Chernin's latest novel is an unsettling and tumultuous story that explores themes of friendship, loss, identity, family, good and evil, madness and transformation. The story is about Charlie, a twelve-year-old girl who befriends the mysterious and intriguing Mignon, a new girl at school whose bizarre and troubled demeanor is the cause of her rejection by other students. Her friendship with Mignon initially costs Charlie her popularity and the alleged normalcy and innocence of her childhood. Once she loses Mignon, her obsession with finding her becomes Charlie's raison d'etre and her undoing. The novel confronts questions of whether or not one person can save another, and what costs for self and other are involved in attempting to do so.

Charlie's entire family - her music prodigy older brother Jonathon, fragile younger brother Sam, philosopher father, psychoanalyst mother, and herself - become obsessed with saving Mignon. Mignon may be being sexually abused and in danger, but no one is sure. Chernin weaves in a clever critique of Freud by illustrating Charlie's mother's inability to believe Mignon's stories because of her own childhood sexual abuse and her subsequent treatment by Freud whereby she learned to mistrust her own experiences.

Narrated through Charlie's stream-of-consciousness thought process, Chernin attempts to get at ways of knowing and understanding outside of language - that which we cannot articulate as children and lose touch with as adults. Charlie reads people's trustworthiness by whether or not they have come to the "end of themselves":

As the story unfolds the lines between what is real and what is imagined begin to blur. When Charlie cannot find Mignon, she tends to "find" her in other people. Or perhaps Mignon is actually a metaphor for parts of herself that Charlie is confronting. We are never really sure. At some points the novel is creatively crafted as a psychotherapeutic-like search for identity and self-discovery (the title itself could be a metaphor for a psychotherapeutic process). At other times the metaphors are too transparent and contrived, and the therapist author too apparent. Touted as a novel for readers who want to think and feel, ask disturbing questions, and confront uncertain answers, it certainly thinks outside the box, especially in terms of writing style. Yet this is not accomplished seamlessly. What I thought and felt were, at times, awe and suspense and, at others, impatience and confusion.

It is worth noting that the novel is published by EdgeWork Books, a publishing company created by several women - some, including Kim Chernin, who were already best-selling authors. They came to the decision to form their own press out of their frustration with the shape and direction of the publishing industry. Since their own books were being turned down for publication at the peak of their careers and labeled as "brilliant but too literary," "too feminist," "too unusual" (287), they worried about what emerging female writers must also be going through. Thus they edit themselves through a peer review process that encourages each person to write without constriction. Their aim is to decentralize and democratize the publishing industry, publish well-written books with creative vision, and offer an on-line space for writers to connect and experiment.