Portrays the events of Katherine Forrester Vigneras's early life and reveals her struggle to cope with the tragic death of her mother, while pursuing her goal to become a concert pianist.

The Pee Dees were a tribe of roughly 500 Native Americans living around 1250 AD in Town Creek-what is now the Central Piedmont area of North Carolina. Sidanela (which translates as "family") chronicles a suspenseful season in the lives of the tribe as seventeen-year-old Red Willow, a feisty tomboy, navigates an agonizing choice. While following her fifteen-year-old brother, Running Wolf, into the woods to spy on his hunt, she witnesses him committing...

After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.