Orange Mint and Honey

Brice's debut novel opens with Shay Dixon, a graduate student burned out to the point of collapse, receiving what she can only call a visitation from her self-appointed spiritual adviser, the late singer Nina Simone, who tells her to go home. Home is Denver, and it means Nona, the mother Shay has not spoken to in seven years — the mother whose drinking, disappearances, and men made Shay's childhood a thing to survive. The Nona she finds is unrecognizable: sober in A.A., holding a good job, keeping a garden, and raising a three-year-old daughter, Sunny, Shay's half-sister. Shay stays, and the novel follows the slow, resisted work of reconciliation, complicated by Shay's anger, her first real romance, and a crisis around a troubled young woman Nona sponsors. It won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award.

Author: Carleen Brice · Original publisher: One World/Ballantine (New York), 2008