Taking a sixteen-year-old girl’s coming-of-age party as a jumping-off point to explore the dreams and struggles of a cast of characters, the narrative navigates three generations of Black American history.

It's 2001, the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming-of-age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for her own ceremony—a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, the story considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history.

As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.