""9 March 1876. My name is Meggie Kelly and I take up this pencil with my twin sister, Susie. We have nothing left, less than nothing. The village of our People has been destroyed, all our possessions burned, our friends butchered by the soldiers, our baby daughters gone, frozen to death on a godforsaken march across these rocky mountains. Empty of human feeling, half-dead ourselves, all that remains of us intact are hearts turned to stone...." So begins the journal of Margaret Kelly, a woman who participated in the government's "Brides for Indians" program in 1873, a program whose conceit was that the way to peace between the United States and the Cheyenne Nation was for one thousand white women to be given as brides in exchange for three hundred horses...but many of these "brides" fell in love with their Cheyenne spouses and had children with them...and became Cheyenne themselves. This novel explores what happens to the bonds between wives and husbands, children and mothers, when society sees them as unspeakable" -- adapted from book flap.