Seven-year-old Hanna Shelby has one big problem: everyone thinks she's Johnny Shelby. She's not only miserable, in 1950s rural Colorado, a boy could get killed acting even a little girlish. So, she buries her doll and tries to fit in. On her twenty-first birthday while working at the embassy in Bonn, Germany, she finds herself teetering on a bridge over the Rhine River. She realizes the risk of not being Hanna is greater than being, and returns to college in the United States presenting as a woman. She's disowned by her family and is fortunate to find a home with a German couple. Just as she's feeling fully at ease in her feminine life, a man sexually assaults and flogs her almost to death. She awakens from