Naja and her best friend Sylda witness a shipwreck one stormy night near their jungle village of Karahvel, discovering a lone survivor: an albino woman in the throes of childbirth. The child who emerges is Rowan, who brings not joy but terror when a mysterious red crescent mark on his neck leads his mother to abandon him. While the village turns its back, a midwife named Kialla claims Rowan as her own before Naja does, despite the shaman Isakora’s rants that Rowan is cursed. Naja, a skeptic of the shaman and her predictions, eventually takes Rowan in only after her father and friends have all died. Crushed by grief, Naja is determined to teach Rowan to take care of himself before she dies. Told through the eyes of Naja, Rowan’s fourth guardian-mother, the narrative deftly pivots from a simple origin story into a complex exploration of society and motherhood imbued with strains of feminism. The author explores the costs of social ostracism, both forcefully inflicted and self-imposed, on an innocent child and the people who have chosen to be his protectors. Grief over death is ever-present within the story and frequently drives the life-altering decisions the characters make. The burdens and joys—sometimes inextricably intertwined—of being a woman and a mother are a consistent theme as well. The novel’s sympathetic characters and its implicit messages about finding a purpose in life promise a series that a general readership will enjoy. Readers see Rowan’s experiences threatening to shape him into a figure of vengeance, a temptation only avoided by the careful teachings of his mother figures and Naja’s mantra from her father: “Still water, steady heart.”