There are so many themes that they best be lumped together as "the human heart in conflict with itself." The characters are easier to delineate. Fourteen year old Billie Jo Kelby is tall, lanky, and identifies with the color red. She was red when she came out of the womb and she has been red ever since: complexion, hair, identification with apples. She is her father's daughter through and through, and she doesn't especially like what she sees.

Her father, Bayard, is a one-dimensional prototype of the silent, dutiful husband who has little to say to anyone until the end of the story when he and Billie Jo recognize that if they are to survive they must put the past behind them, and the only way to accomplish that is to talk. Her mother Pol is better developed though still a prototype of the stoic, misplaced...