A partly autobiographical depiction of a young woman's rebellion against the narrow values and repressed barbarity of a struggling Protestant bourgeoisie at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alberta lives with her parents in a small, snowbound provincial town in northern Norway, above Arctic circle. She is imaginative and intelligent but feels blocked by a crippling sense of her own inadequacy, insignificance, and guilt. The departure of her adored brother introduces a new urgency to her painful, almost abnormal sensitivities. Brilliantly recreating the physical immediacy of a remote place and the social reality of a rigidly confined society, this delicate sketch of adolescence subtly describes the effects of climate on the human heart.