The moment Jem joins her class in the middle of Silent Reading, Alice knows her life is changed. Jem McCrail is a fantastical godsend to the timid young Alice Pilling.

“Like a dropped acorn,” she appears halfway through the week, halfway through the term, and halfway through Miss Aldridge’s Silent Reading Hour. Through the doorway she barely clears, wearing clothes like the cowshed-crouching urchin she encountered in her favorite P. G. Wodehouse story, Jem leads the stammering Alice into a world of culture, truancy, and bizarrerie—a world far beyond the desiccated lessons of school.

The girls cultivate a bond based on a wicked and encircling sense of humor, an impish joy in indelicate literature, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Jem seduces Alice with esoteric literature and the fabric of the past - and then she vanishes. Five years on, Jem blazes across her sphere again. And then the infuriating Giovanni appears.