Half a Heart

by Rosellen Brown

120 Members (2.93)

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Description

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 1980's. 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 show more 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 the compromise of her sixties ideals, the results are complicated: What claim does Miriam have on Ronnee after all this time, and what does Ronnee want of her mother now? Ronnee wrestles with her fury at her mother's mysterious disappearance from her life. With which family -- and which race -- does Ronnee identify? Half a Heart is a profoundly moving story about estrangement and intimacy, race and privilege, identity and belonging. show less

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16+ Works 900 Members
Rosellen Brown is the author of the best-selling novel "Before & After" as well as "Half a Heart", "Civil Wars", & others. She lives in Chicago. (Bowker Author Biography)

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
DDC/MDS
813.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English1900-19991945-1999
LCC
PS3552 .R7 .H35Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
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Statistics

Members
120
Popularity
270,632
Rating
(2.93)
Languages
English
Media
Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
ISBNs
12
ASINs
3