In the New Orleans of the '30s and '40s, things-and people-are supposed to be black and white. Cille and her light-skinned brothers are neither. They are "the color that looks not-quite white next to a white man, and not-quite colored next to a colored man. It was a non-color in a place where you had to be something." The daughter of a dreamy alcoholic father who introduces Cille to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley" but who exits her life too soon, and a mother who teaches her children not the love of God but the fear of him, young Cille struggles for balance and identity in a world where race and class define people for life, and where her brothers destroy themselves beating against the bars of the cage of a divided culture.
"An artistic achievement... An ardent new talent telling in fine, sensuous prose the story of an in between Alice in a wonderland of blacks and whites."
