Effie Latimer is on a quest, a heroine's journey. The difficulty is, there are few prototypes. Dragon-slayers, explorers who are challenged to follow the wisdom of the heart, are rarely female. (Yes, there's Joan of Arc, but look what they did to her.) The novel, a story of obsessive love, is set in the late 1980s; it is a sometimes humorous psychological study of a woman in the throes of loss, a woman who listens to her heart but forgets to heed her head. Effie returns to college to pursue another post-grad degree and is wooed by a professor, an age-old tale, though when the man in question dumps her, as he has many other coeds, Effie decides to exact revenge—not in a malicious way, though one certainly troubling to her mentor.