In a typical Brown touch, the author opens her book with a chatty acknowledgement section thanking a support network that ranges from friends, publishers, and models, to the animals that sustain her. Following is an "Introduction" where she asks tolerance for occasional and slight historical license: placing a few news stories days or weeks from their actual dates to further the plot. Having dealt with minor historical inaccuracies, Brown praises her readers for their help in making her work successful and admonishes them to make use of their own creativity, suggesting that anyone's active use of imagination enriches everyone. Beyond those fairly unorthodox forewords, the book adopts a straightforward plot structure. Brown abandons earlier experiments with time for a traditional chronological narrative, and she sees to it that all characters are fully introduced near the beginning of the book, occasionally telling us about them...