A novel that critics have compared with William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Toni Morrison. Jojo, thirteen years old, and her younger sister Kayla live with their black grandparents on a farm on the Gulf coast of Mississippi, with the sporadic company of their mother, Leonie, a woman who would like to be a better mother than she is. When the father of both, a white man, is going to leave prison -Parchman Farm, the same penitentiary in which Jojo's grandfather served an unjust sentence during his youth-, Leonie insists on going to pick him up with the children. During the hazardous journey, Jojo, Kayla and Leonie must learn to relate as a family, and Jojo will meet Richie, another child with whom he will discover the legacy of slavery and the importance of reconciling with the past.