Title from Playaway label. ON ORDER RECORD. "HD." "LIGHT." Release date supplied by publisher. Issued on Playaway, a dedicated audio media player. One set of earphones and one AAA battery required for listening.
Summary:
From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novelset in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabamaabout a mother fighting for her sanity and survival [A] powerful book. Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Gilead Emotionally propulsive Oprah Daily Showcases Ayana Mathiss grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read. Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelters squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava cant forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaints father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residentsfamilies whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land.
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