[Rainey is] achingly beautiful and cruelly intimidating … that in-your-face mix of fear and fearlessness, carnality, control and powerlessness that is what it sometimes takes to survive as a female in America … But Landis never lets you forget who the true victim is. In a world where the adults behave at best like wrinkled spoiled children and at worst like criminals, there’s no one more lost and vulnerable than this raging, magnificent, abandoned little girl, who manages by persistence to grow up.