Summary

Chapter 1. The novel opens with the narrator, Lizet, reflecting on the canals of Miami, and the ways that her family had thrown all sorts of trash into them when she was a child. As she now works in a research lab, trying to understand the destruction of coral reefs around the world, her family's environmental pollution is a long-running joke. Other, less funny, parts of her history remain untold. Lizet also thinks of the time, years earlier, when she fell in a different canal and had to be treated with intravenous antibiotics. This reminds her another family story, in which she was three years old and found her floaties, then blew them up and jumped into the canal across the street from their house. On both occasions, her family said, there had been no need to worry, because she was fine.

Chapter 2. The...