Asta in the Wings

In the late 1970s, seven-year-old Asta Hewitt lives with her bookish older brother, Orion, and their delusional mother in an isolated house in rural Maine, where the children are kept apart from a world their mother insists is a plague-wasted wasteland. Shut away from reality, Asta and Orion create a secret, theatrical society of their own, filling their days with imaginative play that both masks and confronts their mother's fantasies. Narrated with dark humor and poignancy, Asta's story follows her resourcefulness as she navigates confinement, fear, and the blurred line between make-believe and the harsh world outside.