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A white teen living a sheltered life seeks to break her rock-star mother out of the cycle of abuse perpetrated on their family.

Sixteen-year-old Jane lives in a large, old Victorian house with younger brother Henry, father Vernon, their cook, their gardener—and Mina, her mother, who, when she’s not out on tour with her world-famous punk band, Placenta, is confined by Vernon to a system of pneumatic tubes that traverse their house. Ever since the onset of the global pandemic over four years ago, Jane and Henry haven’t been allowed to return to school, instead receiving a bizarre regimen of home-school instruction from Vernon, while Mina watches on helplessly from her capsule in the tubes. Only when Jane stumbles on a cache of home movies—actually security camera footage from around their house dating back to her parents’ courtship days—does she begin to gain some perspective on her dysfunctional, abusive family life. In secret, she starts composing a punk opera to express her desire to save her mother from the life she seems trapped in. When Mina leaves to go on tour for Placenta’s latest album, Jane uses her wits to mount a nascent, persistent rebellion against Vernon’s toxic grip on their family’s psyche. Expertly blending fabulism with hard realism and Victorian language with contemporary teen-speak, this powerful narrative examines the myriad effects of emotional and physical abuse on a family.

Painful yet compulsively readable.