Three single mothers of three bastard children from three generations, each one vitally connected to a ghost town located where sea meets land on Santa Cruz County's northern coast.
In 1959 Kaitlin Lowrie resettles in Cliffport with her mother and her son -- the only household hanging on in an all-but-forgotten locale. But in 1965 Janice McLoughlin, long-absentee landlady, shows up and is determined to sell the place. Elisabeth Lowrie despairs of their being evicted from her cherished, lifelong home.
It falls to the feisty Lowrie daughter to span the gap between the two older women. While the outspoken Jan tells her life story aloud, Katie has also to read her mother's notebooks in the more formal language of Elise's memoir. Katie dreams then schemes how to stay living on the land.
In their letters, phone calls, journals, and conversations, we hear the distinct yet disparate voices of these strong-willed women -- tough on the outside, sensitive within -- as they come to terms with one another and themselves. Katie, Elise, Jan: three naked ladies, each in her own way as resilient, enduring, and irrepressible as the wild bulbous Amaryllis belladonna plants rooted out West and surviving up and down California's Central Coast.