"A heartrending story about a young mother's fight to keep her daughter and the winds of fortune that tear them apart, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things and The Last Year of the War. California, 1938--When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser's daughter. She moves into Celine and Truman Calvert's...

A mixed-species fugitive, Jes tries to blend in on a pleasure moon, but instead catches the attention of a crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job and is forced to bend to the mobster's will until he decides to take the big boss down.

Violet helps her sixteen-year-old sister, Lily, travel to an infant asylum in Philadelphia so Lily can have her child in secret. They do not know the asylum's physician is experimenting on the girls with eugenics. After five years, both women are back in Scranton finding their way in marriage and engagement and grapple with their worth and virtue.