Coming-of-age of a mad scientist girl in an ordinary world
My main character, Miranda J. McCleod, is not unlike other teens in wanting to understand her true calling and find true love amidst parental pressures and societal expectations. It’s just that her actual nature is to be a mad scientist—something no one, especially not Miranda, grasps. So instead, Miranda tries beauty tricks to attract boys only to find herself alone and more interested in “scientific theories” about glamour. Taking another tack, she becomes a knight in a local re-enactment society, but the boys do not swarm to her, and she becomes distracted by ideas about the effects of metallurgic properties on the brain. Finally, she believes that she’s found her true love and her true calling as a scientist. But she will only gain genuine understanding of herself and that love through her greatest mad science yet: the theory that at age 14 after fighting with her father, she got sucked through a faulty air conditioner in a dilapidated brown station wagon and landed in a parallel universe.