In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much?too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband?s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the ?ugly duckling? whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers.