Calling Me Home
-
-
4.0 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
89-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favour to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis and it's a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mother in her thirties, to drop everything to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Ohio.
As they drive, Isabelle starts to tell her story: as a willful teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell deeply in love with Robert Prewitt, the black son of her family's housekeeper-in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences makes it clear that Dorrie and Isabelle are headed for a gathering of the utmost importance, and that the history of Isabelle's first and greatest love just might help Dorrie find her own way.
With tenderness and searing emotion, Calling Me Home illuminates the hardships, passions and dreams that link women across race, generations and time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kibler, in alternating first-person narrations, delivers a rousing debut about forbidden love and unexpected friendships over the span of six decades. Dorrie, an African-American hairstylist in East Texas, is asked by one of her regular clients, Isabelle, a woman in her 80s, for a strange favor a ride to Cincinnati. On the road, Dorrie learns of Isabelle's painful past. Both in conversations in the car and via flashback from her teenage years, Isabelle reveals her former childhood of white privilege in a prejudiced Southern town and her love affair with her maid's brother, Robert, a black man. She and Robert married in secret only to find their clandestine relationship quickly torn apart. After giving up Robert for lost, Isabelle married again this time for convenience, but Robert's return forces her to confront difficult questions about love, commitment, and her antagonistic relationship with her family. Now, as Dorrie and Isabelle reach Cincinnati, Isabelle reveals her reasons for going to attend a funeral, which uncovers long-held emotions and secrets buried for 60 years. In this compelling tale, Kibler handles decades of race relations with sensitivity and finds a nice balance between the characters of Dorrie and Isabelle. Drawing from her own family history in Texas, Kibler relays a familiar story in a fresh way.
