The Dawson women: Mazzy Dawson, a mulatto sushi chef in southern California, who struggles with the untimely death of her mother and the cloak of mystery that her grandmother keeps her family's history enshrouded in, Kennedy Dawson, a college student who fights heroin addiction and racial tensions at an L. A. County drug detox to bring her unborn child into the world, and Lucy Dawson, a discontented housewife in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who, during the 1960's, starts to question the racially segregated suburban world around her and ultimately chooses an unconventional and dangerous path for love. In, Raising Warrior Queens, Teresa C. Smith examines the rarely simple, sometimes tumultuous and always loyal mother/daughter dynamic with sharp wit and a tender, yet unwavering eye.