Absalom's Daughters

By Suzanne Feldman 
Henry Holt & Company, Hardcover, 9781627794534, 272pp.
Publication Date: July 5, 2016

Two half-sisters, one black and one white, embark on a risky road trip through the 1950s Jim Crow South in this spellbinding story of identity and race

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for colored music and dreams of life as a big city radio star. These teenaged girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs.

In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial striving and violence. Suzanne Feldman's" Absalom's Daughters" combines the buddy movie, the coming-of-age tale, and a dash of magical realism to enthrall and move us with an unforgettable, illuminating novel.