Black & Lit Book Club- July 2022
Black & Lit Book Club features new books by Black Kentucky writers. This reading group is open to anyone wanting to attend, not only KBWC members. When possible, we will meet with the author. We will explore issues related to race and also discuss the characters' relationships. family, home life, dreams, and challenges. We'll study the writing as well, such as word choice, themes, character, plot, and setting.
The KBWC Black & Lit Book Club meets on the second Tuesday of every other month on Zoom. The first 25 registrants each month receive a free copy of the selected book. Sponsored by the Fund for the Arts and the Kentucky Humanities.
The KBWC is sponsored in part by: Kentucky Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Grass Community Foundation, and WUKY.
July's Black & Lit Book Club Author is Jacinda Townsend, author of Mother Country
About Mother Country:
Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.
In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.
About Mother Country:
