A birth mother

Raised by her beloved grandmother in tension-filled, segregated Virginia, Grace is barely a teenager when she loses her Maw Maw and is shipped up North to live with her formidably ambitious Aunt Hattie in a society of stifling respectability. When Grace falls in love and ends up pregnant, she is quickly hidden away: then, in the ultimate act of betrayal, her baby girl is taken from her and given up for adoption.

An adoptive mother

Beautiful, intelligent and fierce, Delores a.k.a. Lolo has never had it easy, her life riddled with pain and loss. Her brightest dream is to be married and to have a family of her own, and she will tell lies and keep secrets to obtain it. When those secrets start to spill out, Lolo is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her dream intact and those she loves together.

The daughter to both

When Lolo’s headstrong daughter Rae discovers that she is adopted, and that she is 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 through the civil unrest of the ‘60s to the cultural shift of the early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel is a hymn to Black motherhood, exploring three women’s intimate struggle with generational trauma and healing.