The night-blooming cereus is a gangly, ugly plant, justifying its existence by producing an annual blossom of ethereal beauty and scent that lasts only one night. Like the flower, Garnet Grant exists in a grim, narrow world, bound by her mother's whims and grudges and her family's hardscrabble survival in rural Kentucky over a century ago. Garnet has dreams, though, and hopes, and the determination to bloom however she can.
