Summary

In the Prologue, Mia Jacob, age 15, narrates from the first-person point of view her experiences the night she escaped from the Community to start a new life for herself. She left the night before an “A” would be branded on her arm for her ambition, among other perceived crimes. The brand was her punishment for reading books. Members of the cult had burned all of the books she had collected with the exception of her copy of The Scarlet Letter. When Mia read that book, she felt she was reading about her own life. She took with her only that book along with a watercolor she had found in one of the drawers in the office.

In Chapter 1, Ivy Jacob grew up in the affluent neighborhood of Beacon Hill in Boston, but she always told people that she came from “west...