ONE DROP: MY FATHER'S HIDDEN LIFE by Bliss Broyard

BIOG

BROYARD

Bliss Broyard knew her father, Anatole Broyard, as the successful book critic for the New York Times and later, as the editor of the New York Times Book Review. In the months before he died of cancer, he yearned to reveal a lifelong secret to his children but succumbed before he mustered up the courage.

It was their mother who told the children that their father had actually been African-American. His light-skinned parents had moved from New Orleans to New York in 1927 where they passed for white in order to get work.

For Bliss, "raised white in Connecticut," this revelation set off a search for identity and reunions with a large extended family in the South. One Drop is a compelling look at the complexities of race from a very personal perspective.

GODS IN ALABAMA by Joshilyn Jackson

FIC

JACKSON

Arlene Fleet is a graduate student living in Chicago. For reasons unbeknownst to the reader. Arlene had left home in Alabama at the age of eighteen, and promised God to never return, to remain celibate and to never tell a lie.

She has been able to keep her promises until her African-American boyfriend wants to accompany her to Alabama to meet her lily-white family. Arlene would rather die. Not only is Arlene reluctant to introduce him to her crazy and bigoted family, but she has a deep dark secret that threatens to come out. Arlene finds she is no longer able to keep her promises.

THE KNOWN WORLD, by Edward P. Jones, 2003.

FIC

JONES

Henry Townsend is a slaveholder in antebellum Manchester County, Virginia. He is also black. After his death, things begin to unravel at his plantation and in the country, revealing the underlying problems and cruelties inherent in slavery.

Like the best fiction, Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel creates a "known world" with fully-realized characters and a compelling plot.