Sweet Potato

Lorenza spends her days handling what could kill her—and her nights wondering where she came from, leaving her feeling like a stranger in her own family. Raised by her adoptive parents, Bird and Artemisia, she divides her time between extracting venom at a herpetology lab and obsessively tracking the woman who birthed her, the one she lovingly calls 'Sweet Potato.' Accustomed to living on her own personal edge, she risks destroying her family as well as facing the truth that some people, even those we idealize, don't want to be found. As she strives to master the dark mystery at the center of her own life, she reckons with questions of blood, belonging, and the stories we inherit about ourselves and those who made us. Lorenza picks up the pieces of her own truth through a freeloader named Gracie, her own adoptive father, and a confidant named Adam, who introduces her to an historic orphanage in Florence, Italy, Ospedale degli Innocenti, where a mother's cry reveals another side to the primal wound of abandonment.