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Fiction
by DéLana R. A. Dameron
A breathtaking debut about one unforgettable Southern Black family, seen through the eyes of its youngest daughter as she comes of age in the 1990s.
"Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are."
So begins award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron's debut novel, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Tabor spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. On Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, where her grandparents live, Mika learns important lessons from the people who raise her: her exhausted parents, who work long hours at multiple jobs while still making sure their kids experience the adventure of family vacations; her older sister, who in a house filled with Motown would rather listen to Alanis Morrisette; her retired grandparents, children of Jim Crow, who realized their own vision of success when they bought their house on the Court in the 1960s, imagining it filled with future generations; and the many neighbors who hold tight to the community they've built, committed to fostering joy and love in an America so insistent on seeing Black people stumble and fall.
With visceral clarity and powerful prose, Dameron reveals the devastation of being made to feel invisible and the transformative power of being seen. Redwood Court is a celebration of extraordinary, ordinary people striving to achieve their own American dreams.
"The lives of several generations of a southern Black family are dramatized in interconnected stories in poet Dameron's captivating fiction debut... . Each story is anchored by a distinct, clear voice, and Dameron has a gift for quiet, eloquent observations that enrich scenes of everyday experiences." —Booklist
"Poet Dameron (How God Ends Us) makes her fiction debut with a gratifying collection about a Black family in South Carolina...Even amid heartache and turmoil, this brims with joy." —Publishers Weekly
"A triumph of a debut, Redwood Court is storytelling at its best: tender, vivid, and richly complicated." —Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone
"A blueprint for writing about complicated, nuanced people and places with dignity and grace ... DéLana R. A. Dameron's relentless love for Columbia, South Carolina, is palpable, and her exquisite storytelling brings us a story of lineage and legacy from unforgettable characters who grab your heart and make you laugh, weep, and hope with them, and for them." —Renée Watson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Piecing Me Together
"A generously transportive novel, one that thoughtfully renders not only each of its characters but also the nuances of its geographies ... The language within it echoes, feels familiar and warm. This book carried me to a joyful elsewhere." —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America
This information about Redwood Court was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
DéLana R. A. Dameron is an artist whose primary medium is storytelling. She is a graduate of New York University's MFA program in poetry and holds a BA degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her debut poetry collection, How God Ends Us, was selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and her second collection, Weary Kingdom, was chosen by Nikky Finney for the Palmetto Poetry Series. Dameron is also the founder of Saloma Acres, an equestrian and cultural space in her hometown in South Carolina, where she resides.
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