Part memoir and part fiction, this book is breathtaking--innovative in its braided form and mix of facts and imagined narrative, disturbing in its revelations about how young women were ostracized and disciplined for their perceived "immorality." As we follow the narrator's efforts to unearth her mother's adoption history, we are dawn into the hidden history of incarceration for girls deemed socially aberrant. The fictional thread that imagines the life of the missing grandmother is a spellbinding and poignant reminder of both personal and social loss when women's voices are silenced.