Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
In a world where no one can go outside for fear of something terrifying that when seen drives people to deadly violence, single mother Malorie and her two children must attempt a terrifying twenty-mile trip downriver while blindfolded.