Effie Latimer is on a quest, a heroine's journey. The difficulty is,
there are few prototypes. Dragon-slayers, explorers who are challenged
to follow the wisdom of the heart, are rarely female. (Yes, there's Joan
of Arc, but look what they did to her.) The novel, a story of obsessive
love, is set in the late 1980s; it is a sometimes humorous psychological
study of a woman in the throes of loss, a woman who listens to her heart
but forgets to heed her head. Effie returns to college to pursue another
post-grad degree and is wooed by a professor, an age-old tale, though
when the man in question dumps her, as he has many other coeds, Effie
decides to exact revenge--not in a malicious way, though one certainly
troubling to her mentor.