Wil is one week away from her twenty-first birthday, but she wonders if she'll ever see the day. Depressed by a breakup with her politically correct boyfriend and fortified with a prescription for lithium, she returns from college to her family... back to where the trouble all started.

Through Wil's unsentimental eyes and wry voice, we meet close-up her perfect and perfectly infuriating mother and her silent mathematician father; her legendary grandfather in his days of strength and in the years of his slow decline; her bizarrely mismatched and wildly assorted uncles and aunts; her legion of cousins who have tried but failed to live up to such names as Grace, Hope, Faith, and Joy.

Determined to understand better the forces that have shaped her, Wil draws on memories of her grandparents and weaves together wisps of stories told of her elders' experiences in World War II internment camps. As familial legends and personal truths slowly entwine, Wil knows that she must find her own threads in her family's complicated tapestry or reconcile herself to emotional exile.