Not yet a woman yet more than a little girl, Rae Dodson is caught up in her family''s drama. Her hip older sister, Kimmie, whom her mother favors, has moved from New Orleans to join them in Detroit, a city that moves as if in synch with the Stevie Wonder tunes that play giddily from new automobiles fresh off the factory lots. Her bid whist–playing mother is as nervous as ever, and her father''s chronic migraines seem less responsive to medication. And while they all occupy the same house, they might as well be living separate lives. When the tenuous peace finally breaks, Rae must decide where her loyalties lie: should she choose her emotionally distant mother, whom she adores, or her affectionate but needy father? Rae does choose and launches into a rich, loving relationship with her dad, for whom she shows a fierce, undying loyalty. But as she matures, she must find a way amid her own budding sexuality to be both Daddy''s girl and her own woman.
A young black woman visits Africa on a quest for peace, meaning, and love in “a beautiful allegory at the heart of a realist novel . . . A strong book” (Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas). In 1986 Detroit, twenty-one-year-old Angie is still mourning the death of her brilliant, radical sister, Ella, when she impulsively decides to pack up and go to the place where Ella tragically died four years before: Nigeria. There, Angie retraces her sister’s steps, all the while navigating the chaotic landscape of a major African country on the brink of democracy and careening toward a coup d’état. At the center of her quest is a love affair that upends everything Angie thought she knew about herself. Against a backdrop of Nigeria’s infamous “go-slow”—traffic as wild and unpredictable as the country itself—Angie begins to unravel the mysteries of the past, and opens herself up to love and life after Ella.