I was immediately captivated by the story of the Native American family portrayed in the early pages of this story - that of a mother, Loretta, releasing her two daughters into state custody to enter into foster care. The writing in the first section is lyrical and beautiful, the characters are fully formed, and the plot intriguing. However, the more I read, the more disoriented I became and, thus, less invested in the story. After the first section of the book, the story is told from the perspectives of various women in the Ojibwe tribe. There is a shifting timeline and while Loretta occasionally appears in this next section, she is sometimes a girl or a young woman without children. Despite the family tree at the beginning of the book, I found myself stopping every few pages to figure out the relationships of various characters to Loretta (strangely, Loretta is not listed in the family tree, and some of the characters are very distant relations). Loretta's daughters don't reappear until after more than fifty pages (of a short book). I expected this novel to explore Loretta's disappearance and her daughters' experiences in foster care. Instead, the various characters share tangential stories. In a different mood, I might have finished this book, but I was not invested in all of the characters and was disappointed that the book did not match its synopsis.