An unexpected, an unexpect-able book.

It starts with a fourteen-year-old girl, Pamela, who lost her mother as well as her hands in an accident, who lives with her grandparents--a cruel grandfather who keeps her locked away from the world, and a grandmother who's lost her ability to protest. Pamela should be helpless, and in fact the author gives us a lot of detail into just how hard it is for her to deal with everyday tasks, and how that difficulty means that she's treated as less than human.

But Pamela is her own person, with a talent for finding patterns in things--from horseracing to deloping new tools to help her gain more function with her arms. The details are fascinating as the author works out, step by step, how Pamela lives, thinks, and changes, blossoming from a girl with no sense of the world, to a worldly young woman (in the best sense) who can look out for herself, and even make difficult choices about not only how she wants to live her life, but how she wants to affect the world around her. ( )