Ofelia is in her seventies, no longer considered a useful colonist, and considered more of an embarrassment than a help by her one remaining child and his disagreeable wife. So when the company decides to abandon as unprofitable the colony world where Ofelia has spent the last 40 years of her life working, she decides to stay behind and live out her remaining years alone in peace for once. This works pretty well for her until members of an intelligent indigenous species discover her there, and suddenly she is the first human to make contact with a completely new alien race. She finds ways to communicate, and helps teach them the basics of the human technology that was left behind. Eventually a team from the government is sent to make official contact, and Ofelia finds herself caught in between the aliens, who she's come to view as friends, and the official team, who see her actions in sharing human knowledge as irresponsible and borderline traitorous to humanity.

Overall really liked this book, Ofelia is an unusual protagonist and pleasantly three-dimensional, and the aliens are very well described and very alien. The one thing that annoyed me is the outright stupidity of the team of supposed alien experts sent by the government for supposedly the most important alien contact in the history of ever. They are just ridiculously incompetent for the most part, which made it seem like a contrivance for many of the problems Ofelia has to sort out. Nonetheless, apart from that I really enjoyed the book and the feisty protagonist with her excellently characterized alien friends.