Half a Heart - Rosellen Brown

Rosellen Brown's extraordinary new novel, Half a Heart, tells the story of a former civil rights activist, Miriam Vener, who feels trapped in the comfortable white upper-middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter, born of Miriam's passionate affair a generation ago with Eljay, a brilliant black professor at a Mississippi college, who has raised the child ever since. When Miriam introduces her daughter to the utterly white New England town where she summers, and to the Houston society which represents her own compromise of her sixties ideals, the results are complicated: What claim does Miriam have on Ronnee after all this time, and what does Ronnee, no longer a child, want of her mother now? As Miriam desperately and awkwardly invites affection from this stranger who shares her blood, Ronnee — hot-tempered, sensitive, manipulative, and deeply hurt — wrestles with her fury at her mother's mysterious disappearance from her life and searches for reparations. With which family — and which race — does Ronnee identify, and how does that affect her relationships with her newly discovered half sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against?

data wydania

2000 (data przybliżona)

ISBN

0374299870

liczba stron

402

słowa kluczowe

ruch praw obywatelskich, wybory życiowe, wyższa klasa średnia, związki międzyrasowe

język

angielski