It centers around a young girl's diary, relating her encounters with the deadly inhabitants of an alternate world. "But I remember when I was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not noticing. They were saying how queer I was a year or two before and how the nurse had called my mother to come and listen to me talking all to myself and I was saying words that nobody could understand. I was speaking the Xu language, but I only remember very few of the words, as it was about the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle." From The White People