Milton Muleborn has envied Matthew Echota, a talented Cherokee artist, ever since they were locked up together in a dangerous juvenile detention center in the late 1980s. Until Matthew escaped, that is. A novel within a novel, we read here Milton’s dark, sometimes comic and possibly unreliable account of the story of their childhood even as, years later, he remains jealous of Matthew’s extraordinary abilities and unlikely success. Milton reveals secrets about their friendship, their families, and their nightmarish, surreal experience of imprisonment. In revisiting the past, he explores the echoing traumas of incarceration and pride.

In the 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation. With the family’s annual bonfire approaching, Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world.

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets 17-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system. But as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.