Loss and leave-taking are major themes. These play out in Amy’s adolescence, characterized by her mother’s neglect and fear of disaster. She writes of losing her Russian tutor — a man with whom both she and Zoe fall in love — to suicide; of leaving home for the University of Tulsa, a “Wonderkid” who matriculates at age 15 and has to negotiate the less intellectual pursuits of dating and parties; and, eventually, of the psychological freedom she discovers through the work of translation, which in equal parts connects and disconnects her with the world. “Each time a Russian word meets an English word it generates a spark,” Croft writes. “And translation offers Amy a new kind of math, an alternative to the math of sacrifice that has ruled her life on her own until today. She can’t cancel out another person’s suffering or death with hers. What she can do is connect.”