Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in 
Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends since
earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different
lives.  Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a  
stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice 
leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spellman College,
where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected 
Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners,

aspiration and inequality.  Annie, abandoned by her mother

as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her, sets off on

a journey that will take her into a world of adversity and peril

culminating in a battle for her life.  (368 pages)