“I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.”

From her earliest memory, Emmeline casts her experience with her father and his experiments with preserving smells as a kind of unreal reality. Even as she gives in to the intoxicating aroma, she compares herself to Alice falling into the unreal wonderland world of the rabbit hole.

“I wondered what it would be like to hold a hand the size of my own, to know someone else who had more questions than answers. I wondered about a lot of things back then.”

Emmeline grows up the victim of what is essentially a kidnapping. Taken by a father desperate to find refuge from his collapsing world, Emmeline grows up in a world where her father is everything. When she sees a boat along the horizon, she wonders what world she is being denied. She is a child denied the critical socialization experience of friends.

“The forest seemed to disappear. I was in the cabin, every scent of it alive: the dried apples in the pantry, the basket of onions in the corner, the lingering whisper of pipe smoke.”

The novel investigates the widely underappreciated olfactory sense. The challenge is to put the tonic experience of an aroma into words. Here, Emmeline compares the experience of smell to being transported into an alternative dimension conjured by a scent but sustained by the imagination that it stirs. Emmeline leaves the forest and feels as if she is back in the cabin, based on the sniff of one of her father’s scented-papers.