The novel covers more than 40 years in the life of Eleanor Bennett, born Coventina “Covey” Lyncook on a tiny, remote Caribbean island. Her life is recounted in short chapters (most two to three pages) that move back and forth between then and the present. To help approach this ambitious novel, this study guide will reassemble the storylines to provide a linear account.

It is 2018, and Eleanor Bennett, retired, living in Southern California, dies from complications from a blood clot after extensive chemotherapy. The family lawyer, Charles Mitch, dutifully notifies Elizabeth’s two grown children: Byron, a globe-trotting oceanographer, an author, and a science advisor for movies and documentaries whose social media talks on saving the ocean have made him a media darling; and Benny, short for Benedetta, his younger sister now living in New York, something of a rebel, a free spirit, a misfit by choice, who has drifted since she dropped out of a prestigious university. She lived for a time in Italy, enthralled by the cooking and by the art. She also lived in Arizona, where she studied ceramics and conducted a tumultuous relationship with Joanie, a graduate assistant. The phone call from the family lawyer telling her of her mother’s death comes the same day Benny is fired from a telemarketing job she loathed.