Solitaire -- Bullet holes and ashes -- The Americans -- Crosshairs -- Epilogue : a word about living (and dying).
Summary:
"Alex Wagner grew up with a patchwork picture of her identity. She was the daughter of two great waves of immigration: her Irish father's American roots were in the 19th century stream of Europeans looking to start over, and her Burmese mother arrived as part of the mid-20th-century wave of Asian and Latin American immigrants, fleeing their own civil wars and economic crises. Both sides of her family embraced America as their new home, leaving behind the Old World, except for the occasional ritual, now emptied of meaning. Alex grew up only knowing that she was brown--a harbinger of a future America, one where we'd gotten past our atavistic ideas of race and ancestry. But this noble idea left her feeling empty and alone. Then one day a cousin on her father's side--the family historian--let slip a family secret: their great-grandfather, the first Wagner to settle in America, might have been Jewish. And Alex was suddenly awakened to the possibility of actually being someone--having an identity that mattered, a tribe to belong to--and was intoxicated by the possibility. So she set off on a quest to find the truth about her family story and to answer the deeper, nagging questions: Who am I? And where do I belong?"-- Provided by publisher.
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