Roadwalkers
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3.7 • 17 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Keepers of the House, a “beautiful” novel following a black mother and daughter through the Great Depression and Civil Rights era (The Boston Globe).
Mary is an orphaned, homeless, African American child, abandoned by the rest of her family and left to care for her younger brother. She becomes a “roadwalker,” a nomad who wanders across the rural south and quickly learns to rely on herself to survive.
When she grows up to become a successful artist and a designer, she has a daughter of her own, Nanda, and she’s determined to hold her child close. But when Nanda is accepted into an elite school on the East Coast, integrating the all-white Catholic girls’ academy, Mary finds she can’t keep some of the world’s cruel realities at bay forever.
Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, Roadwalkers is the story of a special bond forged by savage history, and a tale of extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice. From a National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, it is “a bold novel [that] seduces us with its vigorous prose, enthralls us with its narrative—and disquiets us with its defiance of our expectations” (The New York Times Book Review).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two narratives uneasily coexist in this latest novel by Grau, one absorbing and potentially riveting, the other curiously dry and flat. The book's first half is as powerful as anything this talented writer ( Nine Women ) has ever produced. Her rhythmic prose accommodates precise yet incandescent descriptions of the natural world, and she evokes the patterns of daily farm life. Abandoned by their parents during the Depression, six young black children become homeless ``roadwalkers'' in the South. Eventually only Baby and her older brother Joseph remain, desperately foraging and stealing in order to survive. Possessed by inchoate anger, Joseph sets fires on a restored plantation; he escapes from a hunting party, but Baby is caught and sent to an orphanage by the farm's kind owner. There the feral child is named Mary Woods and treated with compassion, until she turns her back on those who succored her. Grau interweaves Baby's story with that of the plantation's white manager, Charles Wilson, drawing a moving comparison. Charles, too, loses his mother at a young age, but he has the safety net of family to sustain him. To this point, the narrative is luminous and involving, although Grau does spell out the spiritual bonds between her characters with some heavy-handedness, proclaiming empathies that are facile and devised. But when, in the book's second half, Mary's daughter, Nanda, becomes the protagonist, the narrative loses its way. Nanda's experiences at boarding school, where she is a pariah in a white world, are meant to explain her bitterness, fury and self-centeredness. But though Grau means to demonstrate how survivors suffer, learn and endure, Nanda and her mother are opaque and charmless; neither has a soul. One wishes that Grau had continued the path on which the first half of the book is so firmly placed.
