The novel is about the coming of age of a young Haitian immigrant, Sophie Caco, who leaves Haiti to join her mother in the United States. The novel moves between two settings, New York and Haiti. Through Sophie and her female generational line (her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother) the novel articulates the struggle of Haitian and Haitian American women with rigid patriarchal values, and forms of sexual abuse that have been internalized by the women themselves.

Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary explores the relationship between rape and narratives of violence in francophone literature and culture. The book offers ways to account for the raped bodies beneath the conflicts of slavery, genocide, dictatorship, natural disasters and war―and to examine why doing so is necessary.