The Chin Kiss King is a heart-wrenching novel that chronicles the lives of three generations of Cuban American women in Miami: Cuca, zealous believer in the hovering presence of spirits; her daughter, Adela a superstitious, gambling cosmetologist with a weakness for men; and Adela's daughter, Maribel, a marketing-research assistant who does not know the power of dreams yet draws spiritual nourishment from the older women.

When Maribel's son, Victor, comes into the world with a severe birth defect on a fateful Leap Day in 1992, the three women who make up his family and who are his sustenance are forced to confront the inextricable ties that bind them to one another.