"Lily tells herself and her ailing mother stories that move back and forth across time, memory and connection, across eras and generations to penetrate the silence between both herself and her mother within them - a collective memory carried in their bones - an almost-lost knowledge from a silenced past. Confronted by this silence, Lily is drawn below the patina of race, gender, sexuality and religion to probe the nature of her own connection to the earth, to the daughters' lives, and to her own existence"