Trisha is the novel’s protagonist. She is a nine-year-old girl, precocious and spunky, with a robust vocabulary compiled from the favorite sayings of her friends and family. Although she is a typical child in many ways, from her enjoyment of crude humor to her love for dolls, Trisha’s complex family dynamics force her to act mature beyond her years. She feels invisible due to Pete and Quilla’s fighting and adopts a falsely cheerful demeanor to try and unite them. Once she is lost in the woods, Trisha has to focus only on herself for the first time since her parents’ divorce. Using bits and pieces of advice from her loved ones as well as her own ingenuity and imagination, she plays a tense survival game for nine days. Along the way she contends with her shaky faith in God and herself, the challenges posed by the elements, and an evil creature that trails her through the woods.

Trisha comes of age over the course of the novel. During her journey through the woods, she gets to know herself more deeply, developing her relationship to her faith and to her own character. She also finally has the opportunity to explore the sad and angry emotions she usually suppresses for the sake of her family.