Summary

The novel begins as a woman named Jane travels to Siberia in order to perform field work on an operation to collect DNA from mammoth samples. Although they are both resistant to the idea, Jane’s two young daughters, Eve and Vera, are brought along to Siberia as well. Eve, in particular, resents the fact that she has been made to spend the summer of her fifteenth year trapped in a remote, cold place instead of socializing with other people. Although Vera enjoys her sister’s spunky refusals to cooperate with their mother, and shares in some of this resentment, she also finds herself immediately moved by the Siberian landscape and by the importance of the project that Jane has set out to contribute to.

Complicating matters further for the two girls is the fact that their mother has been summoned to the...