When the nine-year-old daughter of a hard-working single mother, a child whose luminous beauty has drawn both benign and sinister attention, is stolen from her home during a summer blackout, a full-scale search is launched, but the child's only hope lies in someone torn between loyalty to the abductor and the desire to save her.

"Thunderstorms are rolling across the summer sky. Every time one breaks, Rose Bowan loses consciousness and has vivid, realistic dreams about being in another woman's body. Is Rose merely dreaming? Or is she, in fact, inhabiting a stranger? Disturbed yet entranced, she sets out to discover what is happening to her, leaving the cocoon of her family's small repertory cinema for the larger, upended world of someone wildly different from herself. Meanwhile...

After spending a vacation underground in the family's bomb shelter, three sisters find a family photo album with three years missing and some evidence that there was a fourth child.