Beginning with a description of a girl climbing a fence—using simple language, and with a sense of in-the-moment immediacy and raw intensity—readers may wonder at first if this could pass as a young adult novel. When a nun yells, “Get off that fence,” and it’s apparent that the fence is an enclosure around a residential school and this unknown girl—an Ojibwe—is trying to escape, the harrowing aspects of this coming of age story begin to take hold.