In one West Philadelphia neighborhood, families come together in celebration of unity and togetherness. Their block parties provide a union that serves as a backdrop for discovering the truth about themselves and the people they think they know.
Best friends Neet and Shay have depended on each other for most of their lives. However, their friendship will be tested when Neet becomes pregnant by one of the corner boys and Shay arranges an abortion that goes terribly wrong.
To Shay's horror, Neet is left unable to bear children and embraces her mother's esoteric yet sometimes...
In one West Philadelphia neighborhood, families come together in celebration of unity and togetherness. Their block parties provide a union that se...
My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you're getting ready to fall in love.
For the last twenty years, the beautiful Verdi Mae has led a comfortable life with Rowe, the conservative professor who rescued her from addiction when she was an undergrad. But her world is about to shift when the smell of butter lingers in the air and Johnson -- the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who pulled her into the fire of passion and all the shadows cast from it -- returns to town.
In -this story of self-discovery that moves seamlessly between the early 1970s and early 1990s-...
My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you're getting ready to fall in love.
For the last twenty years, the beautiful Verdi Mae has led a...
Set in west Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the upper-black-class. But their lives quickly unravel as their father's lucrative catering business collapses. He disappears and is presumed dead, and their mother suffers an apparent breakdown. The girls are wrenched from their mother, and as the novel opens they are living in foster care in a working-class neighborhood in the home of Mae, a politically connected card shark. Though Mae is...
Set in west Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescen...
Neena's mother, Freeda, disappeared on a cold February morning in 1984, leaving the fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, in the care of Nan, their stern grandmother. Two decades later, Neena--no longer living in Philadelphia--supports herself by blackmailing married men. Returning to her childhood home when a sting goes terribly wrong, she avoids her grandmother while attempting to pull one last hustle on a prominent local lawyer. But discovering that Tish has been hospitalized with pregnancy complications forces Neena to come to terms with the woman who raised her and the...
Neena's mother, Freeda, disappeared on a cold February morning in 1984, leaving the fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, in the car...
"Even the air is palpable in Tumbling...The story moves forth on the power of Ms. McKinney-Whetstone's characters. Ms. McKinney-Whetstone captures the formidable struggle to protect both a community and a family." --New York Times Book Review
"Warm and intimate.... Tumbling is an accomplished novel, with sharply drawn characters, exuberant prose, plenty of period detail and a wise, forgiving outlook on family life." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review
The beloved bestselling debut novel that launched the luminous career of Diane McKinney...
"Even the air is palpable in Tumbling...The story moves forth on the power of Ms. McKinney-Whetstone's characters. Ms. McKinney-Whetstone ...
Diane McKinney-Whetstone's nationally bestselling novel, Tumbling, immersed us into Philadelphia's black community during the Civil Rights era, and she returns to the city in this new historical novel about a cast of nineteenth-century characters whose colorful lives intersect at the legendary Lazaretto--America's first quarantine hospital.
Isolated on an island where two rivers meet, the Lazaretto quarantine hospital is the first stop for immigrants who wish to begin new lives in Philadelphia. The Lazaretto's black live-in staff forge a strong social community, and when...
Diane McKinney-Whetstone's nationally bestselling novel, Tumbling, immersed us into Philadelphia's black community during the Civil Right...
