This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women.　The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. 　Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.

Nasrin Babakhani researches in the areas of literary criticism, magical realism, realism postcolonialism, and feminism. She　holds a Ph.D. in North American studies from the　University of Göttingen.