Race, sexuality, honesty, abuse, love and forgiveness are interwoven as characters in Kalayla reveal themselves. We meet three families, one Irish, one Italian and one black, confronting the legacy of the past within the context of life in 1999 Cambridge, MA.
Kalayla: a feisty bi-racial, 11 year old loner whose world implodes when she discovers her parents belong in the Guinness Book of World Records for being "The World's Biggest Liars"about her mother's family.
Maureen: Kalayla's mother cocoons herself in art projects, deflecting the pain of her parent's rejection. Her husband's sudden death catapults her into life as a single mother raising a rebellious, incomprehensible daughter.
Lena: their landlady, financially successful, seventy-two years old, wears only black, and lives in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. Lena is tormented by memories of the dead—her twin sons and husband, and the living—two sons from whom she is estranged.
Anyone who has experienced the angularities, rigid pockets and soft spots of family life can take hope from reading Kalayla which shows that pathways for change do exist—and if we choose to, we can find them.