In an unnamed Eastern European country just after a bloody revolution topples its Communist regime, thirteen-year-old Emma loses her dissident parents and is adopted by a grandmother she's never met—a woman who reads fortunes in coffee dregs and lives with her husband's ghost. As the town eyes the old woman with suspicion, Emma learns her strange ways amid a world reinventing itself after dictatorship.
When a repressive government collapses, the struggle shifts to who will be remembered and for what. Uncertainty, jostling for power, and violence still simmering under the surface keep the past an open contest rather than a closed book.
Freedom is easier to define by its absence than by what happens once you have it. When oppression ends, people must work out who they are and what their past was, and that turns out to be its own struggle.
People shut out of any real political power build other ways to act on the world, such as ritual, superstition and spells. These inner worlds can be the only freedom open to them, and they carry real force for those who live by them.
A family line can be made by handing on knowledge, habits and wisdom rather than by genes alone. Two people who have each known solitude can form a bond whose inheritance, passed through generations of women, matters more than biology.
Getting through a traumatic past takes a ritual that openly names the dead and the wrongs done, like burning the bones of the old. Such a rite does not erase failings but binds the survivors more tightly to one another.