Emer Morrisey is a young girl in Ireland when Oliver Cromwell's army razes her village and kills her parents before her eyes. She is taken in by a drunken uncle, sold into sexual slavery, and finds herself the captive of a loathsome Frenchman.

She manages to escape and becomes a pirate. Before long she has amassed a heavy treasure chest and has found true love with her first mate. But as she's hiding her stash on a Jamaican beach she's ambushed by the Frenchman. Both die in the sand, but not before Emer is cursed to live 100 lives as a dog.

She does this, and is finally reincarnated in the present day as Saffron Adams, a girl in New Jersey. She's completely aware at birth and has all of her memories, but she's too smart to let on. She waits for her chance to return to Jamaica and retrieve her treasure, little suspecting that the Frenchman still waits for her.

This is nominally a YA novel. It is really in the tradition of Vonnegut and Tom Robbins-- a fantastic narrative that casts a stern eye on human foolishness. A. S. King has the number of our consumerist culture, and she's ringing in with a phone call from the real world. Saffron Adams' cocatenated identities exhume the raging violence that's in all of our pasts, and the centuries of servitude we've suffered since, and weaves it into a metaphorical, dazzling, embroidered pirate's cape.