Susan Ouriou's first novel explores a season in the life of three women, two sisters - on an artist, the other a codemaker - and their mother. The women have made their separate ways from Montreal to Mexico, the land of their father and husband gone missing ten years ago. Their reunion is a grudging one and their love often aching, uncertain, and flawed.

The women's family resembles that of the damselfish, a family of dear enemies where each member jealously guards its own patch of coral reef yet unites with the others to stave off incursions from the outside. A valiant, yet too often futile effort, since, like the damselfish, these women are without defences or camouflage.