Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor --- raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness." But they could not rule her inner life. Befriending the animals on the lonely estate as well as the characters in the novels she read in secret, young Maude nurtured in herself the compassion and love that her parents forbid as weak. And when, after more than a decade, an outsider managed to penetrate her family's paranoid world, Maude seized her opportunity.