A dreamy, secretive teenage girl named Teddý living on a farm in rural Iceland has a chance encounter with a visiting cartographer in 1962. When he discovers her gift for mathematics, she unexpectedly finds herself encouraged to pursue a college education. Another chance encounter, this time with a U.S. astronaut preparing for the moon mission, changes the course of her life again—this time after her graduation. Teddý herself struggles to chart her own way: “Every time she tried to think about the future, her mind wandered, wrestled with something entirely unrelated.” Pálsdóttir often approaches her characters at a slant, from different angles. Midway through Teddý’s first, very formative airplane ride, the pilot of the small plane collapses. We learn how she handles the emergency only later, through a conversation at a party between characters who don’t reappear. Teddý remains in many ways opaque, even as she finally finds “the courage to plan something, she who appeared lost in the strange world her life had now become.” The plan she hatches requires a double life, a great deal of lying, and bank fraud. Pálsdóttir has broad interests and a playful, slyly unconventional style; sections in first person on a commercial airline flight in 2004 pull the reader out of the 1960s and ‘70s and into the novel’s future. Other sections have a dreamlike quality. As we watch Teddý strive to achieve her ambitions, Pálsdóttir gives us glimpses of Iceland’s changing position in the world and the nascent women’s liberation movement.