2.5
Roadwalkers
ByPublisher Description
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,
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" (
).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesRoadwalkers Reviews
2.5
“This is the story of a mother (called Baby, later Mary) and then her daughter Nanda; and, unfortunately, it reads like two different books instead of one.
I was ready to give this 5 stars until I got to PART 2. Baby's story was so compelling and interesting that The second half was completely disconnected from the first half. It's almost as if it was written by a different author. The tone and style bear no relationship to the first story, which could stand alone as a novella.
And then we were thrown into Nanda's story.. I wanted to know more about Baby/Mary Woods.
Excellent writing, poor story telling. No discernible plot. Just a series of events shaped around characters who, when you finally feel like you are getting to know them, are pushed to the side”
About Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of nine novels and short story collections, whose work is set primarily in her native South. Grau was raised in Alabama and Louisiana, and many of her novels document the broad social changes of the Deep South during the twentieth century, particularly as they affected African Americans. Grau’s first novel,
(1958), about the descendants of European pioneers living on an island off the coast of Louisiana, established her as a master of vivid description, both for characters and locale,a style she maintained throughout her career. Her public profile rose during the civil rights movement, when her dynastic novel
(1964), which dealt with race relations in Alabama, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.
Other books by Shirley Ann Grau
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