Publisher's Synopsis
Mary is rich, Ruth smart, and they envy Caroline who is beautiful. They are unsavory young shamans with an obsession to cheat old age and death. Except for a single mistake, it is well within their capacity to do it. They are the Special Ones, grievously selfish people who can absorb the force of life from plants and impart that power into any living thing-even a replica of themselves in the form of a living wooden statue.
Mary spends part of her fortune to import a sacred kapok tree from the Amazon. Ruth entices Barney, a sculptor, to carve the tree in the likeness of gorgeous Caroline. But things quickly go wrong. The creation of Caroline's statue ages the girls from within during the final days of its creation. The creation of three statues becomes impossible. The sculptor doesn't grow older, but does suffer from insomnia and strange erotic visions before he dies.
The three women now look older than thirty. Their alliance collapses as they fight like wasps for possession of the statue, year after year unto middle-age, unaware that a part of Caroline's soul has already bled into it. The figure is determined to remain herself and not be occupied.
Mary has a son, Jim, who has inherited her gifts. Secretive by nature and not understanding the statue's hunger for survival, she tells him nothing of the figure which Caroline is determined to steal from Ruth, using Jim as the agency of the theft.
