East of Eden

Highly sympathetic, compassionate and solid, Abra is the daughter of a man whose life begins to crumble, guilty as he is of embezzlement, and possibly vulnerable to blackmail for participating in the tawdry "circus" in Cathy's whorehouse. "Two features would be with her always. Her chin was firm and her mouth was as sweet as a flower and very wide and pink. Her hazel eyes were sharp and intelligent and completely fearless." She falls in love with Aron, but in the wake of his failure of commitment and retreat into the Church, she is drawn to Cal. She challenges Aron's insistence on imagining her as a virgin-goddess, in much the same way that Adam had imagined Cathy. Like Cal, she worries that she has inherited her father's propensity to sin. Together, at the end of the novel, they are free to determine and embark upon their own joint destiny, to embrace the principle of timshel, as a new version of Adam and Eve.