Merlina writes, using light that pours through the Greyhound windows. For the first time in her life -- fourteen years is hardly a lifetime, unless the young woman is finished like a debutante whose entrance to her parents’ society is the final landmark on her much-anticipated path to marriage and children, or accomplished like an artist whose oils represent the pinnacle of a much larger collection of pencil sketches and watercolors, of which the mastery and ardent expression captured early attention, or fixed like the mindset of one whose learning is done, whose wonder has ceased, whose complacency replaces the passions that kept ideas and ambitions alive through struggles -- Merlina grasps truths that her church’s Bible did not make plain, the library’s novels and biographies failed to r
