Set in the coastal district of South Carolina. Four women, one mother and three daughters each bring their own distinct personalities as well as struggles to the story.
Indigo, the youngest daughter a child of twelve in the beginning of the novel, experiences puberty and struggles with innate gifts for creating life in her many homemade dolls along with a budding mystical music ability. Often times her peculiar behavior is explained away in the expression, “she’s got too much south in her.”
Cypress, the middle daughter is a formally trained dancer who leaps, twist and turns right through the story she however struggles with the up and down life of a dancer and attempts to pacify her hurts through sex, drugs and alcohol.
Sassafrass is the oldest daughter a weaver of traipses like her mother. Sassafrass is an intelligent woman with a penchant for no good men; she cannot get over her abusive, drug addicted love interest a jazz saxophonist named Mitchell.
Hilda Effania is the mother and the most stable member of the family in terms of geography and mental fitness. Hilda is a skilled weaver and known in the community as such. Speaking primarily through letters written to her daughters throughout the novel, Hilda provides comfort, caustic advice, wisdom and reason in a chaotic world. Even with this, Hilda is often overly optimistic, as mothers tend to be concerning their children.
The two oldest daughters go off in pursuit of their goals and dreams only to encounter cruelty and opposition and a strong sense that their lives are shambles.
“Creation is everything you do make something”
This motto hangs in Sassafrass’s apartment and is indicative of this family’s struggles. Each woman from mother down is creative and independent, which does not equate into stability in their personal lives actually quite the opposite happens to these women battered by life at every turn.
The author brings resolution when all is said and done the wayward daughters come home. Cypress breaks free from a life of promiscuity and drinking to excess and makes her way home. Sassafrass after fulfilling her dream of living in an artist commune rids herself of her perennial no good man and comes home pregnant from his seed. In a brief but poetic ending, the women find liberation from their struggles there in the costal district of their upbringing.
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