In a small town of apparently apathetic citizenry, 30-something Walter Mitchell, whose wife divorced him and moved to another state with their daughter, somehow ends up taking in the teenage daughter of his neighbor, a horridly neglectful mother. Maher carefully lays out Walter’s slippery slope of determining what he feels is best for this child on the cusp of womanhood. As young Amanda expresses her burgeoning awakening of sexuality, Walter supresses the natural physical response in himself, carefully talking himself and Amanda through the gauntlet to which he has inadvertently led them. In the end, he insists on the punishment he believes he deserves. Though not an ideal execution, the torment of the main character, his self-enforced isolation from support, and the self-control he exhibits, brilliantly portrays the dichotomy of nature versus civilization, the social mores that separate us from animals and their natural instinct. The only comparison to Lolita would have to consider this a retelling, but that would still belie the fact that the main characters are on opposite ends of the morality spectrum. I received this intriguing, controversial story from the publisher RedDoor publishing through NetGalley.