In the following excerpt, Narveson contends that the narratives given by the three characters are just as perplexing to them as to the reader. Each character is carefully sorting out the overlapping conflicts in their lives.

It used to be said. .. that there were few memorable women characters in American fiction. I haven't heard that said lately, but I am reminded of it because Michael Dorris's novel has three memorable women characters as narrators.

This three-generational story unfolds backward. Its narrators, each telling one large chunk of the story, are what we have been persuaded to call Native American, but what they themselves call Indian. The first to narrate is fifteen-year-old Rayona whose father is black but who is raised by her Indian mother, about whom she knows much and doesn't know more; the second is Rayona's wayward mother Christine, who doesn't know anything at all about...