Virginia, 1965. It is at her grandmother's knee that Grace learns the power of the blood. The blood that flows in all and connects all life. A respected midwife, rich in wisdom and lore, Maw Maw is Grace's whole world. But everything changes the night her grandmother delivers a white woman's Black baby and Maw Maw is the one to pay the price. When Grace is sent up North to live with her only living relative, her Aunt Hattie–a formidably ambitious woman who has firmly left behind her Southern roots in pursuit of upward mobility–Grace finds she is an outsider in what feels like a strange new land. It is only when she meets Dale, a beautiful boy with the heart of a warrior poet, that Grace begins to feel that she belongs. When they fall in love, Grace knows that their future together is bright.
However, when their relationship is discovered by Dale's equally ambitious mother, Dale is shipped off to college in the South and, soon after, Grace discovers she is pregnant…and alone. Worse is when her Aunt Hattie discovers her pregnancy. In an ultimate act of self-preservation, cruelty and perhaps even love, Hattie betrays Grace by giving her daughter up for adoption, setting in motion the fates of three generations of three very different women: a birth mother who had her child taken away; the adoptive mother who raised that child; and the child who is the literal product of the two.
Stretching from the American South during the Great Migration to New York during the Civil Rights Movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, to Brooklyn and women's march toward work/life balance in the '90s and early 2000s, Denene Millner's beautifully devastating novel explores these three women's intimate struggle with their own histories, with truth and healing, with being mothers, with being women, with knowing who they really are, and, ultimately, with understanding the power of nature, nurture and the love that binds them.