The unsettled

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Mathis, Ayana

Mathis, Ayana

Eva H. Perry Regional
Fuquay-Varina Community
Green Road Community
Leesville Community
Morrisville Community
Southgate Community

Adult Fiction

Eva H. Perry Regional - Adult Fiction
Fuquay-Varina Community - Adult Fiction
Green Road Community - Adult Fiction
Leesville Community - Adult Fiction
Morrisville Community - Adult Fiction
Oberlin Regional - Adult Fiction
Southgate Community - Adult Fiction

"From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Book

Books

a641c686-3a16-8f94-6621-ea51a352fdf2

9780525519935

BK

2025-08-17T09:17:52.160Z

-1

Fiction

Fiction

MATHIS

Wake County Public Libraries

Eva H. Perry Regional
Fuquay-Varina Community
Green Road Community
Leesville Community
Morrisville Community
Oberlin Regional
Southgate Community

9780525519935

2023

Alfred A. Knopf

grouped_work

African American families -- Fiction
African American women -- Fiction
Alabama -- Fiction
Domestic fiction
Historical fiction
Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
Mothers and sons -- Fiction
Pennsylvania -- Fiction
Philadelphia (Pa.) -- Fiction
Psychic trauma -- Fiction
Shelters for the homeless -- Fiction
Social problem fiction

The unsettled

The unsettled / Ayana Mathis

The unsettled

African American families
African American women
Mothers and daughters
Mothers and sons
Psychic trauma
Shelters for the homeless