Suzanne Feldman

Absalom's Daughters Suzanne Feldman

Two half sisters, one black and one white, embark on a risky road trip through the 1950s Jim Crow South 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 teenaged 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 junker of a car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial striving and violence. On one level, the story is an entertaining and quirky caper through a colorful historical landscape, but a deeper cut of the novel reveals its profound engagement with abiding issues of socioeconomic class, race, and identity politics in the uneasy mixed communities of a region haunted by a brutal history. Like Thelma & Louise meets God Help the Child, 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.