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A Novel
by Denene Millner
Join New York Times bestselling author Denene Millner as she explores the lives of three generations of women tied together by love, hope, dreams, ambition...and family secrets in this epic novel.
Meet Grace: raised by her beloved grandmother in tension-filled, post-segregation Virginia, Grace is barely a teenager when she loses her grandmother. Shellshocked, she is shipped up North to live with her formidably ambitious Aunt Hattie―a woman who firmly left behind her Southern roots in pursuit of upward mobility. Feeling like a fish out of water in the high society world filled with fancy teas and coveted debutante balls, Grace's only place of comfort is with the smart, handsome son of one of the society's grand dames.
Meet Delores: beautiful, intelligent and fierce, Delores a.k.a. Lolo has never had it easy. Once she makes it north, she puts aside her dream of being a model to do what she has to do to survive as a woman with little money and no mooring: get married and have a family of her own. When secrets start to spill out and she and her family slowly begin to unravel, Lolo is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her dream intact and those she loves together.
Meet Rae: when Lolo's headstrong daughter, Rae discovers that she is adopted, it's just one secret among others that her family is keeping. When Rae finds out that she's about to become a mother herself, she knows that there is an important reckoning that must be faced about herself and her two mothers.
Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women's equality in early 2000s, Denene Millner's beautifully wrought novel explores three women's intimate, and often complicated, struggle with what it truly means to be family.
"Millner beautifully limns the experiences of a woman who must give up her child, a mother who has adopted, and Black women everywhere who must negotiate the roles of wife and mother while entertaining their own dreams." ―Library Journal
"In delicious, decadent prose, Denene Millner does what few authors can--compose a sprawling multigenerational tale that is necessary American reading. One Blood sings the song of the South in a voice that is heartbreaking, hopeful, and resilient. A masterpiece." ―Tara M. Stringfellow, National Bestselling author of Memphis
"One Blood is the haunting, yet wonderfully written story of three women, Grace, LoLo and Rae, who are connected through time, circumstances…and more than just blood. From the first pages, Denene Millner had me captivated with the intimate stories and too many heartbreaking moments of these women as they struggled against every adversity, fighting to find their place and their voice in this world. With prose that was so beautiful, I often paused to read a sentence twice, I was left thinking about these women and how their lives were eternally linked, long after I finished this amazing novel." ―New York Times bestselling author Victoria Christopher Murray
"Denene Millner is a masterful weaver of words, characters, and worlds. One Blood is a beautiful, brilliant American epic that speaks to Black motherhood, female relationship, marriage, family, legacy, love and healing. It is simultaneously deeply intimate and grandly sweeping." ―Tarana Burke, New York Times bestselling author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
This information about One Blood 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.
Denene Millner is a six-time New York Times bestselling author, Emmy Award–nominated TV show host and award-winning journalist who has written thirty-one books, among them Taraji P. Henson's Around the Way Girl and the picture book Early Sunday Morning. Millner is also the editorial director of Denene Millner Books, an award-winning imprint that has published two Caldecott Honor books, a Newbery Honor Book, a Kirkus Prize for Children's Literature winner, and a Southern Book Award winner. A MacDowell Fellow, Millner has written essays for the New York Times, Glamour and NPR, which hosted her critically-acclaimed podcast, "Speakeasy with Denene." Millner is a graduate of Hofstra University. She lives in Atlanta with her two daughters and their goldendoodle, Franklin.
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