In the refuge of a deserted forest, two little girls draw "worlds more beautiful and sensible than their own." Their mother has vanished, never to return, and in the wake of her abandonment, the girls' father has become violent. Vivi looks at her younger sister's face and mentally mixes the colors that would replicate "the tender pink of consequence" that marks Calla's slapped cheek.

"Stay close to your sister," their mother told Vivi just before she left and Vivi takes these final words as a command. They give a deeper layer to the children's game the girls learned from their father, the Vietnamese version of hide-and-seek that was perfected by warfare, Seekers or trốn tìm. Calla is expert at running and hiding. Vivi is expert at worrying and searching.

Both girls become steeped in the art world, Calla as a painter who puzzles gallery visitors, Vivi as an art conservator at one of Chicago's leading art museums. Their lives have diverged; only at their father's funeral do they establish a tenuous form of contact.

Calla is still the wild child, drawn to chaos and addiction. Vivi is on the brink of a stability she's always wanted, recently engaged to a museum colleague. Samuel is gentle and careful, a single parent who "sees the world as it should be, not as it was." She and Samuel share a project, an exhibit that centers around The Blue Mirror,a painting by a Vietnamese French surrealist painter, K.P. Ly.

This orderly existence falls apart when Calla bursts in with a strange link to this painting and its creator, a sketch and a letter found in their father's memorabilia. Vivi shrugs this off until she sees Ly's painting. She discovers pentimento and against all protocol, goes below the layers of paint, and unearths a whole other work of art, one that is the same as the sketch that Calla discovered.

Against her better judgement, Vivi leaves her carefully constructed life and joins Calla in a quest to uncover the layers of family mysteries that span three continents. It's a search that takes the sisters from their hometown of Deer Creek to an estate in Provence and finally to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese village where their father's family waits for them.

Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon (Asia by the Book, July 2023,) goes far beyond the "warped little fairy tale" that Vivi claims is the life that she and Calla have wrestled with since childhood. Thai explores the bond between sisters that is perhaps the most powerful and potentially destructive relationship of all, with love, honesty, and without a sugar-coated resolution. Mirroring the fairy tales that echo throughout this novel, she gives each sister what she's always wanted but with the slightly bitter twist that's true to the times we live in.She skillfully skirts melodrama while not shying away from the drama that exists in every family, disclosing secrets and mysteries that never ring false. Studding the narrative with evocative details and careful research, she offers the scent of crushed lilies, the smell of "fried scallions and wet dog" that clings to a dilapidated taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, and the "pungency of scorched cheese and coffee grounds" that clings to a deserted kitchen. She defines what it means to "rediscover oneself in a river of names" as the shadows gain solid forms and bring clarity to a hidden history.