"WE WERE DELINQUENTS, ADDICTS, MENTAL CASES, ORPHANS AND KIDS FROM BROKEN HOMES."

Fifteen-year-old Kate Steiner is not sure why she is suddenly boarding at an East Coast school for troubled kids, though there is evidence that her lawyer parents are having marital problems. It is the mid-1970's, and at the progressive school where she has landed, Kate is initiated into a stratified society inhabited by kids who fell through the cracks.

Kate must grapple with moral ambiguities when she discovers that Patrick, her first boyfriend, is also a slip-sliding drug addict. In the loosening of family ties, and faced with an inscrutable headmaster, uncommunicative parents and a doomed first love, Kate makes shadowy passage through her questioning adolescence...finding solace in a 'soul catcher' dangling inside a geodesic dome built by a quirky boy whosurprises her with an unexpected friendship.

Praise for international bestseller Katia Lief's novels:

"Taut, clean storytelling." —Publishers Weekly

"Readers will want to read more of this talented writer's work." —New York Journal of Books