Maggie Morris resembles a human. Unknown and unattached, she moves seamlessly through her days, a polished collection of patterns. Her only honest relationship is with the dormant tree outside her Brooklyn loft window. When she unexpectedly runs into her childhood best friend, Dana, a Tsalagi girl who disappeared the summer they turned nine, Dana's cryptic references about the events surrounding her disappearance launch Maggie down a rabbit hole of questions, not only about that long-ago summer but about who she's become and why.
Magpie explores appropriation and masking as the means through which an undiagnosed autistic woman builds a functional identity, burying her true one in the process. Maggie is difficult, odd, and soulful-in search of not only answers to a childhood mystery but an authenticity she has no idea how to recognize.