In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Jim Crow Georgia for Philadelphia in the Great Migration, expecting the North to keep its promises. Instead she marries August Shepherd, watches her firstborn twins die of an illness a few pennies' worth of medicine could have cured, and raises nine more children in poverty, armoring them — and herself — with a discipline so unsentimental that her children grow up starved of tenderness. Each of the twelve chapters then follows one child into a distinct American fate across the middle twentieth century: among them Floyd, a traveling musician hiding his homosexuality; Six, scarred and sent South, who becomes a preacher; Ruthie, whose child may not be August's; Ella, given away to a childless sister-in-law; Alice and Franklin, divided by money, war, and addiction; and Bell, whose closing chapter brings the family's damage — and Hattie's buried grief — into the open. The chapters accumulate into a counter-history of the Great Migration told through one family's private losses, asking what survival required of the mothers who engineered it and what it cost the children who were its object. Chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 on publication in December 2012, the novel became a New York Times bestseller.
Author: Ayana Mathis · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2012
