Summary

The narrator introduces herself as Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a 26-year-old pregnant Minneapolis woman who is planning to meet her birth mother for the first time. Her adoptive parents are Glen and Sera Songmaker, a pair of wealthy vegan liberal hippies. Cedar's mother is Ojibwe, and Cedar embraced her Native American roots as a child, before turning to Catholicism to find meaning (and agitate her non-Christian parents). She publishes a Catholic magazine called Zeal, where she has written about Kateri Tekakwitha, the Native American saint. Cedar calls the gas station on the Ojibwe reservation that her birth mother owns and gets directions to their location. The phone is answered by a snarling teenager, who Cedar presumes to be her biological sister. Sera is worried about Cedar traveling anywhere because some sort of apocalyptic event is underway. The narrative being written is in...