After five-year-old Kivuli Farley’s first day of school, a teacher she thinks is the most beautiful person she has ever met disappears. A few weeks later, the woman’s body is discovered under a trash pile set to burn on the coffee plantation in Arusha, Tanzania, where Kivuli lives with her Maasai father, British mother, and her mother’s long-time love ― a gay, black woman who had been in an abusive relationship with the murdered teacher. Kivuli grows up seeking the truth of these circumstances, but secrets and lies confound her at every turn.
When she’s fourteen, Kivuli’s parents send her to stay for a year in America on the Roses’ guest ranch where her great-grandfather had immigrated decades ago. She’s anxious to learn more about her Maasai ancestor buried in Nevada before she was born, but the present journey proves to be as distressing as the past when she learns the old man had hidden a threatening note that led to a devastating tragedy for the Rose family.
What Kivuli desires above all is to find a way for those still wounded to heal and a path to redemption for two women worlds apart: an incarcerated child abductor, and the killer she knows best ― her own mother. As she opens herself to the teachings of a Lakota-Sioux horse master, the lesson in a provocative painting, the friendship of an adopted Indian boy with two dads, the challenging views of a South African Catholic priest, and ultimately a dangerous communication with the seemingly unredeemable kidnapper, the way becomes clear.
As Kivuli encounters diverse cultures, faiths, and passions, victims and perpetrators draw inexorably together on the road to forgiveness.
