About the Book:
Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family's trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighbourhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbour Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother's mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.
Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.
Published by Penguin Random House
Released April 2022
My Thoughts:
This one is a bold and busy story, following the lives of the North women, a Memphis family, from the 1940s through to the 2000s. Through KKK lynchings, the death of Martin Luther King, the Gulf War, 9/11, and neighbourhood gang wars, this novel crams a lot in, all set against a background of entrenched and systemic racism.
My only issue with it has been the structure, with so much going on spanning so long, I feel it would have worked better if it was told chronologically, but instead it's all over the place, back and forward through so many timelines and so many characters.
Otherwise, a cracking good read and brilliantly narrated. The North women are a force and I loved reading about their lives and connections with each other, their ancestors, and their beloved Memphis.
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