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The Bootlegger's Mistress

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A streetwise African American teenager hastily departs bigoted Anderson, South Carolina in the 1940s. During her travels over a span of nearly eighty years, she assumes the identity of her alter ego while living a good life as a nationally respected media mogul. But it is marked with deep-rooted secrets: one involving the murder of a White man and the other dealing with the disappearance of a prominent Black man, both from her past life in the Deep South.

The Bootlegger's Mistress embodies the essence of the Great Migration, the decades-long movement of six million African Americans from the racially oppressive South to the purportedly economic opportunity-laden North during much of the twentieth century.

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    • Kirkus

      August 1, 2021
      A Black nonagenarian's disclosure of a secret from her past sparks an investigation. In this historical novel, Little moves between present-day Newark and the mid-20th-century rural South, where Carrie Lacey, a young Black girl, finds ways to survive under Jim Crow laws and the constant threat of violence. In Newark, 95-year-old Dicie Caughman is a respected journalist and a pillar of the Black community. But when the police take her in for questioning--from the Women's History Month luncheon where she is one of the honorees--Dicie reveals that she is Carrie and has long kept her past a secret from everyone. The narrative moves between the present day and the protagonist's youth as her story slowly develops. With the help of her grandson and a lawyer, she returns to South Carolina to stand trial for the murder of Tommy Joe Butler, a bootlegger she unwillingly worked for. The trial uncovers truths about the rural town where Carrie grew up and where her father was known for helping Black residents facing trouble escape to safer parts of the country. A dramatic courtroom scene divulges what actually happened to Tommy Joe and allows the community to move forward. While the dual timelines make for a complicated narrative, Little manages to keep most of the threads from tangling, particularly through the distinct voices in Carrie's and Dicie's sections of the book. But Dicie's narration, while capturing the voice of an older woman, can be overly detailed. Although the author writes the Southern characters' speech in a dialect that vividly captures the sound of the region, some readers may find the lines unappealing on the page ("An' he teached me a whole lot 'bout knowin' how to claim wha' be rightfully mine"). The novel is clearly based on both historical research and an intimate understanding of the emotional aspects of the Great Migration, and it does an excellent job of telling the stories not just of individuals, but of entire communities as well. An engaging and well-researched tale of Black life in the 20th century.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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  • English

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