A gritty-yet-sexy debut that follows Annie as she leaves her NYC life of bartending and dancing, driving cross-country to her home state of Alaska to see her estranged and dying mother.

Annie is burning out. She performs at Club X as Dog-Faced Girl, a burlesque act in which she hides her face behind a dog mask. It’s the only way she can dance—her greatest obsession—while making enough money for rent. But when she receives an unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Vera, postmarked from the remote island in rural Alaska where Annie grew up, everything changes. 

Annie never knew her mother, who left when she was only a few days old. Her father, a stoic, workaholic aluminum welder and fisherman, insisted on keeping her mother’s identity a secret. But now, on her deathbed, Vera wants to meet Annie. And with her father recently passed (ashes still lost somewhere in the mail), Annie knows it’s time to return home. So she borrows a Buick LeSabre and starts a journey through the Midwest into Canada. Her travels are interspersed with emails from Vera through which Annie learns how her parents met, and about her mother’s past as an actress.

On the road, Annie sleeps where she can. Her attempts at stripping are unsuccessful and humiliating. Her money dwindles. She begins to steal gas. Wildfires encroach the further north she goes. For a thousand-dollar fee she agrees to dance for the bachelor party at a private lodge on a remote lake. After a delirious, dangerous night that she barely survives, she finally crosses the border into Alaska. Not long after, the LeSabre gives out. Half-broken but drawn on inexorably by the threat of Vera’s death, and a visceral call of her homeland, Annie abandons the LeSabre and hitchhikes to the end of the highway system, across the bay, to the island of her birth, where Vera awaits.