Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices.

Ruby's blood holds the secret to the Water that keeps her and her fellow Congregants alive and enriches Darwin West, who has enslaved them for two centuries, but when her romance with an Overseer, Ford, brings her freedom in the modern world, she faces a terrible choice.