The heroine is fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as
her family flees a postapocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a
recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled
by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds
sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery
that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the
community, as well as the odd and exotic natives. "Girl in Landscape" is
a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a
meditation on language and perception, and a homage to the great
American tradition of the western.