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Fiction. Literature. HTML: 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.… (more)
User reviews
There is something so addicting about Grau's writing, her prose is wonderful and the story flows very easily. There are holes in this story, but while reading I became so involved in her wonderful story telling ability that wasn't until after that I spotted a few things I would have liked to be different. The story is about Baby, the men who find her, the nuns who looked after her and later her daughter. I felt a remove from the characters in this one, but her characterizations are so great that this did not lessen my enjoyment of this story. While I can't say that I really liked these characters, I can say that I admired them. Baby came from nothing and built herself and a business into a very successful something.
I sometimes think that if an author can really write, they can make almost anything interesting. This author can write.