It is the story of Reina and Constancia Aguero, Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina, forty-eight years old, living in Cuba in the early 1990s, was once a devoted daughter of la revolucion; Constancia, an eager to assimilate naturalized American, smuggled herself off the island in 1962.

Reina is tall, darkly beautiful, unmarried, and magnetically sexual, a master electrician who is known as Companera Amazona among her countless male suitors, and who basks in the admiration she receives in her trade and in her bed. Constancia is petite, perfectly put together, pale skinned, an inspirationally successful yet modest cosmetics saleswoman, long resigned to her passionless marriage.

Reina believes in only what she can grasp with her five senses; Constancia believes in miracles that "arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster." Reina lives surrounded by their father's belongings, the tangible remains of her childhood; Constancia has inherited only a startling resemblance to their mother - the mysterious Blanca - which she wears like an unwanted mask.

The sisters' stories are braided with the voice from the past of their father, Ignacio, a renowned naturalist whose chronicling of Cuba's dying species mirrored his own sad inability to prevent familial tragedy. It is in the memories of their parents - dead many years but still powerfully present - that the sisters' lives have remained inextricably bound. Tireless scientists, Ignacio and Blanca understood the perfect truth of the language of nature, but never learned to speak it in their own tongue.

What they left their daughters - the picture of a dark and uncertain history sifted with half-truths and pure lies - is the burden and the gift the two women struggle with as they move unknowingly toward reunion.