Olivia ran away from her home in Connecticut 3 years ago, eventually ending up in a town in Pennsylvania called Chapel Hill. There's not much to the town for her, other than Sunflower, her best friend, who she's also in love with.
One night, weird shit starts happening. A very tall, very sarcastic person named Christmas emerges from the employee bathroom at the drive-in where Olivia works. What looks like a random homeless woman the jocks have chosen to harass, turns out instead to be a very large lizard woman named Lizzie, who swallows one of the jocks whole before turning her attention on Olivia. Rain falls from the sky that makes people mindless drones who fly into murderous fury if you touch them. Unless the rain that falls causes glass to spread over everything like ice.
And in the midst of all that, Olivia just wants to make sure Sunflower's safe and get out of town. The explanation, at least the first part of it, comes in the first third of the book. The rest is how the characters adjust to this information. Piper stays primarily focused on Olivia's thoughts, though we get Olivia's observations or guesses about what's going on in Christmas' mind. Piper also uses aspects of the strange rain to do a flashback/info-dump to explain what's happening and how it all relates to Sunflower.
Which is one of the big things of the story, how much of Olivia's focus on Sunflower is because she really does care, and how much is because that's what she was created to be? Where is the line between those two things, if it even exists? Olivia still, even seeing how the truth (or part of it) changes Sunflower, still wants to help her. Doesn't seem able to be angry at her. How much of that is her, and how much of that's the intent of her creator?
I think Piper would argue the source of Olivia's character doesn't matter so much as what she does with it. If she's kind, if she takes on burdens for others, fine. What is it she's trying to accomplish, what's her goal?
'Sunflower needed to hear it. Optimism would keep her going. Christmas didn't understand because they had probably never had a best friend before, someone both difficult to love and yet impossible to do otherwise. Likely Christmas took up the difficult side of their relationships.'
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