Subtitle from book jacket.-"A highly ambitious and stylish literary debut set against the 1960's Chicago jazz scene about a talented but troubled singer's heartbreaking relationship with her precocious ten-year-old daughter"

-It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is a city of uneasy tensions: segregation, sexual experimentation, free love, the Cold War. It is also home to one of the country's most vibrant jazz scenes. Naomi Hill, a singer at the Blue Angel club, has been poised on the brink of stardom for nearly ten years. When her big break arrives, it comes at enormous personal cost. Sophia, her ten-year-old daughter, must struggle for her mother's love ... and harbors the terrible fear that the world could end at any moment.