In the late 1850s, Celina, a young girl aged fifteen, takes up work as a maid for the Victor Hugo family in Guernsey. There she encounters the delicate balance between the professional and the personal, and the obligations upon her as her livelihood is at stake.; Axelrad’s compelling recreation of a relationship whose traces she found in Hugo’s diaries and letters, captures the changing and challenging times in which Celina lived, and life in the Channel Islands.