"A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed...

While spending the summer in Chinatown with his great-aunt, a young boy finds an old ten-man dragon in a shop and gets a number of people to help him repair it.

When her father goes away, eleven-year-old California "Callie" Poppy winds up with her eccentric Great-Aunt Monica and their ancestor, the once-famous etiquette expert Eleanor Fontaine, now a hypersensitive ghost.

In this love letter to Cairo, Egypt, a young child is sung a lullaby by her great-aunt who paints a vivid portrait of the ancient city as the child drifts off to sleep.

Jumping at the chance to visit her beloved great-aunt in California to escape her life, Robyn begins to see herself and the people she loves most with a bit more clarity, pushing her to take chances she hadn't dreamed of before.

Inheriting her beloved great-aunt's sketchbook, a recently divorced woman uncovers mysteries about her great-aunt's star-crossed romance with a nobleman in World War II Venice.