This novel, like many novels named after the main character, focuses on the growth and changes of that character, a bildungsroman. In The Rowan, the reader launches into the beginnings of a particular child who proves to be pivotal in the communications and transportation of her expanding culture and in that culture's first contacts with alien life.

This unique child lacks a family and roots: She is called "the Rowan child" after the Rowan Mining Camp where she was found in a mud slide. This loss of identity shapes her in indelible ways. As the ward of the state, she has a foster mother whose birth children resent the Rowan. As a potential Prime, she works very hard with an unsympathetic teacher to learn the skills and duties of Tower operations. As a brilliant Talent, she is also socially isolated; few normal humans or lesser Talents can bear...