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Grace: A Novel
For a runaway slave in the 1840s South, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic master. That's what 15-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she leaves behind her beloved Momma and sister, Hazel, and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amid a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel's dice tables all too often.
The product of Naomi and Jeremy's union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the declining estate, and a day of supposed freedom quickly turns into a day of unfathomable violence that will define Josey - and her lost mother - for years to come.
Deftly weaving together the stories of Josey and Naomi - who narrates the entire novel, unable to leave her daughter alone in the land of the living - Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history. It is a universal story of freedom, love, and motherhood told in a dazzling and original voice and set against a rich and transporting historical backdrop.
The product of Naomi and Jeremy's union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the declining estate, and a day of supposed freedom quickly turns into a day of unfathomable violence that will define Josey - and her lost mother - for years to come.
Deftly weaving together the stories of Josey and Naomi - who narrates the entire novel, unable to leave her daughter alone in the land of the living - Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history. It is a universal story of freedom, love, and motherhood told in a dazzling and original voice and set against a rich and transporting historical backdrop.
Audible Audio
Published June 14, 2016
About the author
Natashia Deón
4 books334 followersNatashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Grace (Counterpoint Press), which was awarded the 2017 First Novel Prize by the American Library Association's Black Caucus (BCALA), was named Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, a New York Times Top Book 2016, a Book Riot Favorite Book of 2016, The Root Best Book of 2016, and an Entropy Magazine Best Book of 2016.
In 2017, she served as a U.S. delegate to Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa's International Writing Workshop (IWP) and the U.S. State Department for Between the Lines, a program bringing international writers together.
Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review, Rattling Wall and other places.
A practicing attorney, law professor, and creator of the popular L.A.-based reading series Dirty Laundry Lit , Deón is the recipient of a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Prague's Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside--Palm Desert.
In 2017, she served as a U.S. delegate to Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa's International Writing Workshop (IWP) and the U.S. State Department for Between the Lines, a program bringing international writers together.
Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review, Rattling Wall and other places.
A practicing attorney, law professor, and creator of the popular L.A.-based reading series Dirty Laundry Lit , Deón is the recipient of a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Prague's Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside--Palm Desert.
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