Blue Sabine is a story of five generations of women in the same family, told in their voices, along with those of some men of Holt blood. It is set along the Sabine River, which divides the state of Texas from Louisiana and the Deep South. From 1867 (when the Holts first came to Texas) to the present, the novel chronicles the emotional lives of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces, all bound by kinship and history. Each comes to terms with being a woman in the West, in Texas, and in her own way and her own time. In its flow and its setting of boundaries, the Sabine River comes to reflect what remains and what changes in the way the Holt women see their world and themselves. "The river forever flows, and it pulls at all it touches," one of the characters says, "yet it never leaves, and it never stays." Two twenty-first century descendants give the narrative its overall shape and connection: Clement, an award-winning movie director, and his cousin Kay-Phuong, a woman of Vietnamese and Holt lineage, who has made herself into a fashion model and actress. They have returned to the Valley of the Sabine, where the Holts have lived for almost two hundred years, to hear once more the old stories and to confirm their own part in the saga. They seek to understand and to play their role in the continuing telling and retelling of the narratives that bind them to their family and to the past.
