"Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take....

Novel about a woman who rebels against the confining middle-class values of her industrious American-Jewish family. Her dream of being an actress ends in failure. She ultimately forfeits her illusions and marries a conventional man with whom she finds sufficient contentment as a suburban wife and mother, thus finally coming to accept her parents' values.

Molly Murphy escapes the typhoid epidemic in New York City in 1902 by going undercover as a cousin of Senator Barney Flynn in his house above the Hudson River. Flynn's wife still mourns the kidnapping and death of their son, and she has turned to spiritualists for solace. Molly, while investigating the spiritualist sisters, also tries to untangle the web around the kidnapping.