From her parents' 1970s tenement home Robyn soon becomes so skilled at shoplifting that her reputation spreads. She takes her punishment at school, but is much more scared of the vicious threats of her father; and as frightened for her mother's safety as for her own. Her fun-loving grandmother offers her comfort, wisdom, and hope that Robyn might be different from her parents. As her father's random cruelty intensifies, she has to seek refuge in her grandmother's home and in the homes of friends, even joining her mother in a women's shelter, all the time learning more about the unpredictable ways of the people around her and her own potential. She'll need all of this precocious wisdom and the assistance of her grandma to face up once and for all to the twisted violence in her home and engineer a way out of this childhood to reach a place of safety and freedom.