Bernadette O'Brien: child prodigy.professor of physics at Harvard.sentenced to die in the electric chair for the shocking murder of two male students. In her journal -- her "death book" as she calls it -- Bernadette takes a dark look back at the unfolding events that led to the extraordinary crime for which she stood trial.Defiance pulls us into the world of a lonely, defiant, brilliant woman -- a misfit child, a girl-genius who left the working class, Irish Catholic world of Fall River, Massachusetts -- a stone's throw away from Cambridge -- who entered the halls of academic privilege at the age of 12, and stayed to rise within its ranks.In the incandescent, erotically charged prose for which she is known, Maso probes the depths of a female psyche -- inextricably embedded in a uniquely American matrix of sexuality, violence, and the clash of class difference -- as no writer before her has done.