This is a novel about adopting convenient truths. On one level it is the story of a child, Missie Missinger, whose life experience is not sufficient to allow her to explain the desperate truth of her situation. Her attempts to rationalise her feelings lead her into real danger. It is also a portrait of the willingness of young children to try to accept situations that they know are wrong, and attempt to live with them. On another level it is the story of Olexander Shevchenko, a young man who has left his own home to begin a new life in a small town in Australia. His life has been a war zone and conflicts of forced loyalties. In spite of this he is unprepared for the small-mindedness of people in his new country that has been shielded from many of the harsher truths of foreign countries. Like Missie, he is innocent - she, because she is a child and has only the knowledge of a child; he, because his innocence was not able to flourish in the corruption of survival as a war-child and refugee and now, in this new place, it begins to surface again. This is a narrative set in the 1950s with truths that are still convenient today.