Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard home on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work there are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep the child . . . while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him.

All is well until the Whitmans - an apparently traditional family with new money and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter - raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: First, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

The women in black, so named for the black frocks they wear while working at Goode’s department store, are busy selling ladies’ dresses during the holiday rush. But they somehow find time to pursue other goals… Patty, in her mid-thirties, has been working at Goode’s for years. Her husband, Frank, eats a steak for dinner every night, watches a few minutes of TV, and then turns in. Patty yearns for a baby, but Frank is always too tired for that kind of thing.

In this stunning debut novel, four generations of complex Black women contend with motherhood and daughterhood, generational trauma and the deeply ingrained tensions and wounds that divide them as they redefine happiness and healing for themselves. In masterful, elegant prose, debut novelist Sarai Johnson has created a rich and moving portrait of Black women’s lives today.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.