Ashley Pennington had no idea what she might encounter when she began reading--under protest--the diaries and letters of her forebears. Of mixed race, and deeply resentful of it, Ashley felt their lives as white women couldn't possibly interest her. Yet she is soon caught up in surprising discoveries about the difficulties they faced in both their career paths and their love lives. Ashley's own problems increase as she plunges headlong into a maelstrom of mixed-race torments with Kevin, the black man she wanted to love, and Doug, the white man she is determined not to love. The women of the past serve to steady her as she passes through a dark night of the soul and faces the hard choices about where she belongs. A story with two time-lines, The Women of Stormland links past and present in an inter-racial crisis as old as America and as contemporary as an Oprah Winfrey show.