This, the tale of a young girl’s struggle to create meaning, is not a young girl’s book. It is a book for adults, a cautionary story about the chaos we weave and for which we must ultimately bear responsibility.


Its heroine, Pira, is the not-so-quiet centre at the book’s heart. What to say about Pira? In describing her, I’m driven to cliché: a tough shell guarding a tender, hidden heart—a heart that can be, and is, wounded. But Pira herself is no cliché. She is, in the author’s own words, “Ix, the jaguar girl!”