Bran’s Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her “common-law stepfather” on Bourdon Farms --- a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. And then she meets Peter, a beautiful, troubled and charming train wreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings.

Struggling to scrape together enough cash and musical talent to make it as a punk rock band on the Lower East Side, Pam, Daniel and Joe are waylaid by surprising arrivals --- a daughter for Pam and Daniel, and a solo hit single for Joe. As the ’90s wane, they work together to elevate Joe’s superstardom and raise baby Flora. On September 11, 2001, the city’s unfathomable devastation coincides with a shattering personal loss for the trio. In the aftermath, Flora comes of age, navigating a charged political landscape and discovering a love of the natural world. But when the country faces an astonishing new threat, Flora’s family will have no choice but to look to the past --- both to examine wounds that have never healed, and to rediscover strengths they have long forgotten.

Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life --- by being the conventional one. But all that changes when her father dies, and she inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters who have renamed the property "Nicotine." The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers’ rights) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she’s desperately lacking. As the Baker family’s lives begin to converge around the fate of the house, Penny grows ever bolder and more desperate to protect it until a fateful night when a reckless confrontation between her old family and her new one changes everything.