4.0
Daughter
ByPublisher Description
Daughter, a penetrating novel by Essence editor Asha Bandele and chosen by Black Issues Book Review as Best Urban Fiction for 2003, follows a young woman through life that changes in one night from a horrific incident with police brutality.
At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter's hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents, her affair with Aya's father, and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past—her losses and regrets—she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness.
Moving between past and present, the novel builds to a dramatic, heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive conclusion. Daughter is a novel that appears to be about police brutality, but police brutality is only the landscape. The heart of the story is about the silence between generations--the secrets mothers keep from their children in an effort to protect them.
At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter's hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents, her affair with Aya's father, and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past—her losses and regrets—she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness.
Moving between past and present, the novel builds to a dramatic, heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive conclusion. Daughter is a novel that appears to be about police brutality, but police brutality is only the landscape. The heart of the story is about the silence between generations--the secrets mothers keep from their children in an effort to protect them.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesDaughter Reviews
4.0
“Aya has made mistakes in her life, but she has worked hard to turn her life around and is now on the straight and narrow. When she is out for a jog, she is mistakenly shot by the police. As her mother waits to find out what is going to happen to her daughter, she reflects back on her own life and how they have arrived to this point.
This was recommended by https://www.instagram.com/browngirlreading/ on Instagram.
This book made me think about how well I knew my own mother when she was in her teens and early 20s. I really don't know too much about what her personal life was like. I know she went to community college and got married and had me by the time she was 24. But I don't know if she went to parties or what she and her friends did on the weekends. I'm sure she doesn't know much about what I did in my late teens and early twenties either.
Miriam, Aya's mother looks back on the life she lived before Aya was born and the years right after she arrived. Each choice she made was to make a life for her daughter. Aya's father was killed shortly after she was born and the manner in which this happens I think is the most chilling part of the experience for Miriam.
This is a touching story that will make you think about mother/daughter relationships as well as how to be the best parent and protect your children as best as you can.”
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