In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beautythe opposite of the life shes left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined shed become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boys daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.