McFadden's seventh novel follows Easter Venetta Bartlett — a character drawn in part on Zora Neale Hurston — out of Waycross, Georgia, where her childhood ends in family catastrophe and a lynching witnessed, through a traveling vaudeville troupe and a faithless love, to Harlem at the height of its Renaissance. There Easter becomes a writer among writers — Garvey's movement, Langston Hughes, Fats Waller, and Nancy Cunard move through her pages — rises on the patronage of a benefactor she cannot trust, and falls in a scandal that exiles her from the literary world for decades, until the civil-rights years and a late revival. The novel was a finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction.
Author: Bernice L. McFadden · Original publisher: Akashic Books (New York), 2010
