Rosie Wilson is the fourteen-year-old protagonist in It's an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World. She is the daughter of a white Jewish mother, Mindy, and a black Protestant father and is striving to keep track of the black part of her heritage. She is a very neat person who keeps things in their proper places, and who loves mornings, folk music, and puns. She fantasizes about a Prince Charming and the "happily ever after" kind of life found in fairy tales.

She and her mother have been living alone in Woodstock, New York, since the divorce of her parents, traveling The Divorce Express, a bus, to New York City on weekends to visit with her father and his second wife and step children. Although she and her mother enjoy a very close relationship, the divorce has created a deep longing for normalcy and yearning for a feeling...