The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Lloyd-Barlow, Viktoria. All the Little Bird-Hearts. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023.

The story is narrated by Sunday, a neurodivergent woman living in the English Lake District in the 1980s with her teenage daughter Dolly. Though Sunday's condition is never clinically labeled, she exhibits behaviors that would today indicate being on the autism spectrum - specific eating habits, intense fixations on niche interests, and difficulties with social cues.

Despite her own struggles, Sunday has raised the precocious Dolly to be a stellar student with ambitions of attending Cambridge. Their sheltered domestic life is upended by the arrivals of Vita and her husband Rols, a wealthy, glamorous couple staying at a friend's nearby home while Rols works on a controversial development project.

From the outset, the sophisticated Vita casts a spell over the impressionable Sunday and Dolly. Vita's brusque conversational style paradoxically puts the literal-minded Sunday at ease. As the pair become surrogate friends, with Vita often appearing unannounced at their home, Dolly finds herself increasingly enamored of their cosmopolitan affluence and cultured ways.

Vita begins treating Dolly as a protégé, exposing her to their elite London social circles and eventually offering the teenage girl lucrative employment assisting with Rols' real estate ventures and their own home renovations. As Dolly accelerates her immersion into their privileged orbit, Sunday feels herself being systematically alienated from her only child.

Tensions arise over Dolly's obvious transformation under Vita's sway - adopting her polished mannerisms, indulging in refined foods and fashions that once appalled her, and losing patience with Sunday's neurodivergent behaviors. Vita stokes these intergenerational divides, usurping traditional maternal roles and sowing doubts about Sunday's parental fitness.

At a lavish garden party thrown by Dolly's wealthy grandparents, the Forresters who control her inheritance, the schism is cemented. It's announced that Dolly has forgone university to become Vita and Rols' full-time assistant, news everyone except Sunday already knew. Despite her frantic objections, Sunday is powerless as her own daughter publicly renounces any association with her in favor of being absorbed into the aristocratic Forrester clan.

In the aftermath, Dolly is swiftly quartered with her grandparents before departing for London under Vita and Rols' cosmopolitan shepherding. A devastated Sunday realizes she's been outmaneuvered and essentially disowned by the very child she raised singlehandedly.

Years later, in the early 1990s, Dolly summons the estranged Sunday for a reunion over coffee. The once-brilliant student has reinvented herself as a bourgeois professional, her polished refinement and material trappings belying her now-posh upward mobility into elite society.

It's revealed that after achieving this longed-for sophistication under Vita and Rols' tutelage, their inner circle soon degenerated into sordid infidelities and illegitimate children as various spouses strayed. The ensuing fallout saw divorces, custody reconfigurations, and Dolly temporarily reclaimed by her birth father, the King, before emerging into her newly materialistic adulthood.

As mother and daughter part ways once again, the universality of their fractured relationship dynamic gives way to melancholy acknowledgment of life's inexorable changes. Dolly has become the self-actualized figure that Vita prophetically molded her to be - free from ancestral constraints, but also severed from the maternal absolution Sunday could provide.

Throughout, the story explores themes of neurodivergence and disability, the oppressive socioeconomic divides exacerbating generational rifts, and how identity formation for marginalized individuals often requires rejecting one's predetermined path and upending systemic norms.

While Vita remains a polarizing agent of chaos, both corruptive and progressive in her influences, Dolly metamorphosizes into the epitome of upward class migration - her transformation an admirable transcendence, but also an accession into perpetuating nobility's most rapacious and discriminatory value systems.

Ultimately, through the storytelling intimacy of Sunday's neurodivergent perceptions, All the Little Bird-Hearts profoundly humanizes the interior experiences typically pathologized and deprived of mainstream representation. Her journey viscerally conveys the palpable alienation engendered by society's biases - an orphaning from customary familial continuity that renders the matriarch a dislocated victim of her own progressively self-actualizing lineage.