Odessa

Yetta is a bright, quick-witted teenage girl with a restless, searching spirit. She feels hemmed in by her mother's anxiety, her father's rules and the future already mapped out for her, and she longs for a freedom whose limits she cannot yet see.

Her family has good reason for caution. Fear has settled over their shtetl, Jews are vanishing without explanation, and rumors circulate of an attack to come. When violence reaches their home, Yetta is killed. Her grieving father turns to his half-formed knowledge of ancient texts and old magic in a desperate effort to bring her back.

Somehow it works, and Yetta returns. She looks as she always did, but she is no longer the girl she was. She senses her family is keeping something from her, and part of the answer lies with a creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, which may be her father's creation and which has plans of its own.