Welch’s protagonist and narrator begins her story full of emotional turmoil and grief. “I feel like I’m in shock,” says 16-year-old Lina Emerson in the Prologue. Her mother is dying. At the age that often marks the transition from childhood into adulthood, Lina, the only child of a loving and supportive single mom, faces the most difficult challenge such a child can face: the loss of that parent. In a single moment, a single visit to the doctor, Lina understands how little she really knows for sure, how everything about herself and her world that she assumed to be true is not reliable. As a social misfit, Lina’s closest friend and confidant is her mother, whom she never dreamed would not be there. Now, she’s in shock.

In her relationship with Ren, her confrontation with her biological father, her reading of her mother’s journal, and ultimately her discovery of the genuine, fatherly love of Howard Mercer, Lina comes to an entirely new perception of who she is. Her Journey to Self-Discovery follows her recovery from that initial state of shock to a self-assurance grounded in love and hope. As the first-person narrator, she (along with the reader) discovers her courage and her capacity for passion, qualities she never guessed she had growing up in Seattle.