Adriana has spent the night locked in a kitchen cabinet to protect her from the possible depredations of soldiers on either side. But there is too much life in Adriana to stay locked up for long, and she sneaks out of the house when daylight arrives.
She gets a glimpse of Amdu out of the corner of her eye and later imagines the soldier outside. He is her soldier. Proudly, she plays the piano so that he will hear. ''She played for an invisible audience of one, and because she imagined her listener had never heard anyone play the piano before and couldn't judge the merits of her playing, she imagined that he would think her brilliant."
The story jumps from Adriana's viewpoint to Amdu's, and occasionally to Adriana at 70, suffering a health crisis on a Long Island commuter train, shortly after remembering and pondering at length the soldier she met when she was 10.
Novelist Joanna Scott endows each adolescent with an abundance of energy and imagination. Amdu at 17 has developed his own belief system, ''a peculiar, combustive faith, a mix of folklore and papal doctrine, Koranic law and his own vivid imagination."
Adriana, too, is a child of singularity, courage, imagination, and cleverness. She dives into the ocean from high cliffs. She sees the animals of Elba as treasures, and she shares them with her soldier.
The world of the two adolescents is both magical and terrible. Each of them is aware of a nearby atrocity that has just occurred, the rape and murder of a young neighbor of Adriana's. They don't discuss this secret. Each has a different knowledge of the event. Adriana knows of it through rumors and from her own potential to be victimized, while Amdu actually witnessed the crime and ran away out of fear that his fellow soldiers would cut out his tongue to silence him. Each struggles to come to grips with a world in which such cruelty exists, and each, though nearly powerless, wonders what he or she might have been able to do about it.
