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 the fact, Ashley felt their lives as white women couldn't possibly interest her. Yet she is soon caught up in surprising discoveries of the difficulties the women of an earlier generation faced in both their career paths and their love lives.

 How does a young woman who's never been allowed to learn anything about sex handle the first man who gets her out on a lonely road in a buggy and makes a pass at her? Should she defend herself and risk losing her man? Or should she do what her sister-in-law has just done, succumb and then insist on a shotgun wedding? Aunt Alana and Aunt Vi--two old ladies in Ashley's view--suddenly become two young women facing life's hardest dilemma, a dilemma involving their entire future. And Ashley's own grandmother, Millie, is not far behind them in her problems of career versus men. A new world opens to Ashley as she begins to understand the fog of ignorance, of not telling, not knowing about their own bodies and what marriage really meant, that former generations of women had to cope with.

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--out of loyalty to her father's race--not to love.The women of the past, through their experiences and their recorded thoughts, steady her as she passes through a dark night of the soul and faces hard choices about where she belongs and which man she belongs with.

A book with two story lines, The Women of Stormland flashes back and forth between past and present, linking both in an interracial crisis as old as America and as contemporary as the morning newspaper.