Four generations of women meet at their dining room table to write about their year of awakening. That’s their assumed agreement anyway. Instead each comes with her own isolated agenda: to either tell off or tell all.

Set in 1910, 1920, 1943 and 1964, in a background of battles for women’s rights and civil rights, their writings reveal shocking secrets about unfaithful hearts, lost loves, and unwanted pregnancy.

Ruby Wright: As a genteel great-grandmother, Ruby is the springboard for her daughter’s fight for women’s right to vote, but at an agonizing price … and not so genteel revelations.

Bess Wright-Pickering: Ruby’s daughter is orchestrating this project but her intent is to get long-awaited answers to painful questions. Fueled by the others’ continued candidness in their writings, she reveals her own harbored secrets from 1920.

Katy Pickering: Bess’s daughter is relieved with writing about why she opened a birth control clinic in 1943. But she believes she’s the only one with terrible secrets, in exposing Jesi’s conception and deformity.

Jesi Pickering: 19-year old Jesi only cares about 1964 and her hidden interest in the Civil Rights movement. She stubbornly remains silent. But with prodding, she eventually writes about why she keeps her lover to herself. Although the youngest and the weakest, her tragic store will be the catalyst.

“In this historical fiction, it is very apparent that Vanessa Russell did her research, but the best part was the way she held the reader’s interest by weaving her story in and out of the lives of these women. You could empathize with the ways they dealt with issues of their times…” 5 star Amazon review