The sheriff has come to "put away" Elizabeth Miller-to take her to the state mental hospital. "Well, I may be crazy," Elizabeth tells us, "but I know I'm not wild-crazy, just maybe quiet-crazy, and I don't know which one is worse." For someone about to be penned up with the "crazy folks," you wouldn't think she'd be so calm and analytical. But Elizabeth Miller knows that her trip to the asylum is her last chance at an independent life, her last chance at getting away from Angela-the little dead girl inside her who won't die, who threatens to take over her life. In the hospital, she will find beauty and terror, but most of all, she will find her own inner strength-the strength to heal herself and to face the family and small town she has had to flee. Joyce Durham Barrett's debut novel is the uplifting story of one woman who triumphs of a terrible past and wakes up to find the world as an adult: ready to embrace it in all its complications, its many shades of meaning and uncertainty, its degrees of good and bad, its wild, wonderful, terrifying, thrilling reality.