Two half sisters, one black and one white, embark on a risky road trip through the Jim Crow South of the 1950s in this spellbinding story of identity and race.
Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother’s laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for “colored music” and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father’s inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what’s rightly theirs.
In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial strife and violence. Suzanne Feldman’s Absalom’s Daughters combines the buddy movie, the coming-of-age tale, and a dash of magical realism to enthrall and move us with an unforgettable, illuminating novel.
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“In Absalom’s Daughters, we are taken into that place where only a really good novel is capable of going?a world that completely absorbs us. Starting in the rural segregated south of the 1950s, the novel drops us into a setting where we taste the dust off the back roads, and breathe in the fear and hope of those who travel along them. This is nothing we are just reading about; this is a space we are a part of. Through her styling, vernacular, and storytelling, Suzanne Feldman has created in Absalom’s Daughters a novel that engages, entertains, provokes, and ultimately reminds us of the complexity and fragility of being human in a world overcrowded with expectation and agenda.”
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Adam Braver, author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars