After her parent's divorce, Lizzy and her mother move to upstate New York to live with Lizzy's grandparents, and Lizzy tries to adjust not only to a new city, but to the physical and emotional changes she is experiencing.
Seventeen-year-old Sephora, a surfer and artist who loves fairy tales and mythology, struggles with a secret so horrible she cannot speak it aloud, especially not to her beautiful, single mother, although they have always been unusually close.
Maggie, a frontierswoman in the 19th century American West, must accept the help of her estranged father when her daughter is snatched by a hooded phantom.
Serafina an illegal migrant worker living in California when the police catch her is sent back to Mexico--without her 3 year old daughter. Twelve years later with a pair of silver barretts her only clue to her daughter, Serafina begins a harrowing journey back across the border to find her daughter.
As a baby in her mother's womb, as a schoolgirl in Manilla, and as a reluctant immigrant to Chicago at age sixteen, Angel burns with a desire to be an activist, but learning truths about her mother and grandmother help her find peace.
"Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed"--OCLC.
