The novel’s chief protagonist, tall, lithe, dark-haired, dark-eyed Anna is, “if not precisely pretty, arresting”(23). She lives connected with her body, working out mechanical problems, such as untying knots while diving, using her sense of touch. She is also physically strong, supporting a 200-pound diving suit and taking rogue diving expeditions while pregnant.

Anna grows up straddling the feminine, domestic worlds of her mother and sister and the secretive external world of her father, whom she accompanies on his underworld missions. By the time she is 12, she learns to adjust her speech and mannerisms to the present company, and her father has the sense that she is “a scrap, a weed that would thrive anywhere, survive anything” (23). Adaptability is her primary character trait; it remains so throughout her life.

As Anna develops, she changes from a young girl who idolizes her father to a young woman who learns self-sufficiency. She sets her own standards of behavior at a time when women, although they take on the public-facing roles the men left behind, are still subject to social expectations and patriarchal scrutiny. Conscious of these expectations, she seeks to hide or smooth over her transgressions. Although she engages in deception to do so, she becomes a female diver and a working, unwed mother at a time when there is no prototype for either identity.