Tan-Tan is not entirely neglected, despite her parents’ preoccupation with their own lives. Tan-Tan is cared for by a human nurse as well as the house computer (called an “eshu”). Indeed, the entire planet is kept peaceful by a pervasive watchdog computer called “Granny Nanny.” Every citizen on Toussaint is implanted with an “earbug” nanotech device when they are born, which allows them instant communication to their house eshu, and to Granny Nanny. Granny Nanny is almost inescapable, preventing premeditated crime and generally regulating human interaction on Toussaint. Unlike other works that use this kind of “Big Brother” element, here Granny Nanny is benevolent, only interfering when she judges someone’s well-being is in danger. She is the ultimate judge, the balance to all that is wrong in Tan-Tan’s life. Unlike Tan-Tan’s parents, Granny Nanny, through her house eshu, has only Tan-Tan’s best interests at heart.
When Tan-Tan is seven years old, her father, Antonio, is forced to confront his wife’s adultery; he manages to go behind Granny Nanny’s back by befriending a group of people that use “headblind” houses, houses that have no eshu, into which Granny Nanny cannot see. Here he obtains a poison that kills his cuckold, sending Antonio to jail and, ultimately, to exile.
The exile is the planet Toussaint in another dimension, a place called New Half-Way Tree. The journey is one-way; there is no communication between the two worlds, and no way to return to Toussaint from New Half-Way Tree. New Half-Way Tree is a rough place, with no Granny Nanny—indeed, no advanced technology at all. It is the negative image of peaceful Toussaint, where the bad are sent to be away from the good.
When Tan-Tan realizes her father is going to be taken to jail, she hides away in the trunk of the car carrying him off, afraid of being separated from her Daddy and desperate for his love and attention. By the time she’s discovered, it’s too late to return her home, and she has to stay in the jail cell with her father until her mother can pick her up the next day. However, Antonio discovers a way of escaping into exile before Granny Nanny can pronounce judgement upon him, (perhaps deciding upon life imprisonment instead of exile), and he selfishly takes his beloved Tan-Tan with him. Together, they climb the Half-Way Tree.
In the wilds of New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan comes to realize where her true comforts came from back on Toussaint. Her relationship with her father is suddenly much closer, much more constant, than it had ever been, and it becomes increasingly clear that her father cannot take care of her properly on the hard, backbreaking prison planet they’ve come to. Tan-Tan finds herself longing for home, and almost immediately misses her house eshu as much as she misses her own mother. Ironically, her earbug device becomes horribly infected, because children were not meant to cross the dimensional veil. The object that used to keep her safe now almost kills her.
The child is exiled with her father, and yet she misses the comforts of home, and those who truly took care of her there. She still clings to her father, surrounded as she is by unfamiliar things, but she is not the only one missing familiar things.
The book takes a disturbing turn when her father begins to note her resemblance to her mother, and gives her his wedding ring to wear on a string around her neck. This gift initiates a horrible mockery of a wedding night, as Antonio takes the resemblance too much to heart, and rapes his daughter on the night of her 9th birthday. What had been the comfort of having her father near is negated by Antonio’s abuse of his power over his daughter.
As Tan-Tan’s role for her father splits in two—she is now both daughter and, although he has remarried, in some senses his wife—her own personality copes with the situation by splitting as well:
Daddy’s hands were hurting, even though his mouth smiled at her like the old Daddy, the one from before the shift tower took them. Daddy was two daddies. She felt her own self split in two to try to understand, to accommodate them both.
Tan-Tan becomes both “good Tan-Tan,” who does as she’s told and loves her Daddy, and “bad Tan-Tan,” the Robber Queen who makes “strong men quiver in their boots when she pass by,” whom no one can hurt.
Just before her sixteenth birthday, Antonio makes the mistake of raping her one last time. He had stopped, more or less, after she had to have an abortion when she was fourteen, but in a drunken rage he attacks her the night before her sweet sixteen birthday party. This time Tan-Tan is armed with a birthday present, a long, sharp hunting knife. When she feels it digging into her side during the rape, bad Tan-Tan takes over:
It must have been the Robber Queen, the outlaw woman, who quick like a snake got the knife braced at her breastbone just as Antonio slammed his heavy body right onto the blade.
The town Tan-Tan is living in has vigilante justice, and self-defense is not considered a mitigating circumstance. Tan-Tan is saved from hanging by a douen (an indigenous sentient species) named Chichibud, who had befriended her the first night after she had arrived on New Half-Way Tree. They escape on the back of his packbird, Benta, narrowly escaping the posse and hunting dogs chasing her, who are bent on carrying out their “eye for an eye” justice on Tan-Tan.
For the second time in Tan-Tan’s life, she has been torn from her home, and again because of her father’s behavior. This time, however, Tan-Tan is not leaving her home passively, although her flight is not what she’d intended; she had been planning on escaping her father by running away to another town called Sweet Pone with her friend and partner, a man called Melonhead.
Chichibud and Benta bring Tan-Tan to the home of the douens, a huge tree called a “Papa Bois,” a daddy tree that provides food and shelter for the douens. The daddy tree is a direct contrast to Antonio, as it provides shelter and without asking anything in return. However, because Tan-Tan is the first human ever allowed into the daddy tree, the rest of the douens are unhappy that their home has been violated by the “tallpeople.”
Tan-Tan must pass a test to prove her willingness to keep their secret. She is thrown a live tree-frog and is expected to eat it. She does so, with Chichibud’s help, but the whole experience is humiliating in an unpleasantly familiar way to Tan-Tan, as it reminds her of things her father had forced her to do. Good Tan-Tan does what she must to survive, but it makes her suspicious, unhappy, and very lonely.
While living with the douens, Tan-Tan has to relearn family ways, to allow herself to be cared for in a way that does not hurt her in return. It has been at least 9 years since she had the overarching parental figure of Granny Nanny to depend on, and it’s hard for Tan-Tan to accept that kind of care again. She is grateful for the sanctuary, but distrustful of good intentions.
Unfortunately, this first experience with true family love is with a family that is quite alien to her. She learns that the so-called packbirds are in fact female douens (called hinte), and she has to learn to see them as adults instead of beasts of burden. Although all young douens can fly, only the hinte can fly as adults, and male douens must partner with them if they wish to fly again. This kind of interpersonal dependence is almost alien to Tan-Tan, who has spent most of her life listening to her human parents (and parent figures) fight.
The douen family structure of mother, father, and offspring, is unfamiliar to Tan-Tan because of the females’ powerful role in douen society; they are bigger than the males, and they are the ones who protect the nest. When visiting human settlements the women mask their true strength by posing as pack-birds, perhaps so they will not threaten the security of the human male role. The douen males are much smaller than humans and are treated as inferiors, almost slaves; a hinte’s size alone would make her a threat to a human man, if the humans realized they were sentient as well.
Ultimately, Tan-Tan is too human, and possibly too old, at sixteen, to properly adapt to douen ways. The ways in which she doesn’t fit into her new home are, at first, not her own fault: for example, her urine kills the maggots that recycle douen excrement, and special arrangements must be made for her to be flown down to the forest floor every time she needs to urinate. Douen food mainly consists of maggots and centipede-like insects, and after her first meal of plain salad, Tan-Tan views her sanctuary as more of a punishment.