DéLana R. A. Dameron
A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK | A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE | A WELL-READ BLACK GIRL BOOK CLUB PICK
“A triumph…Redwood Court is storytelling at its best: tender, vivid, and richly complicated.” –Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone
“This novel delivers the kind of choral experience that I have savored in books as disparate as James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge.” –Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake, for The New York Times Book Review
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, and can’t wait to taste real independence; 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.
