Grace

Starred review from April 18, 2016
Deón’s powerful debut is a
moving, mystical family saga set over the course of 25 years in the deep South. The ghost of Naomi, a woman who escaped slavery, narrates, beginning with her own gruesome murder moments after she delivers her blond-haired baby, Josie. Careening back and forth through time, Naomi first recounts her childhood flight after the grisly murders of her mother and the man who enslaved them. The story lurches from Naomi’s youth in a Georgia brothel to Josie’s childhood in an Alabama plantation house, where she’s been taken in by Annie Graham, a barren white woman. Annie lives with her pedophilic, lecherous brother, George, who preys on Josie when she’s at her most vulnerable. Naomi relives falling in love with a white gambler and becoming pregnant with his child. As a ghost, she hovers over Josie as she, too, falls in love, with the son of Annie’s onetime house slave, Sissy. Naomi must watch helplessly as Josie gives birth to twins whose father leaves not once but twice to fight for their freedom. The book provides penetrating insight into how confusing, violent, and treacherous life remained in the South after the Emancipation Proclamation, and how little life improved for freed slaves, even after the war. The omnipresences of Naomi’s ghost renders the story wide-angled, vast, and magical. Deón is a writer of great talent, using lyrical language and convincing, unobtrusive dialect to build portraits of each tragic individual as the sprawling story moves to its redemptive end.

April 1, 2016
Fifteen-year-old Naomi flees slavery in Alabama for a better life of freedom up North--only to run into trouble along the way. Naomi has spent her childhood on Massa Hilden's plantation watching her mother systematically raped under his orders because Hilden wants to breed more slaves to sell. But when Massa Hilden focuses on Naomi and her sister Hazel as the new targets for his sexual violence, the girls' mother kills Massa Hilden and pays for it with her own life. Although it's Hazel who has long held dreams of freedom, it's only Naomi who then manages to escape the plantation. She makes it as far as Coyners, Georgia, before falling sick and being rescued by Cynthia, the madam of the local brothel, who's looking for a new slave she doesn't actually have to lay out any money to purchase. Naomi hides out there, falls in love, and finds herself pregnant--until her fugitive-slave past is discovered and she's forced on the run again. But Naomi doesn't get far; her baby decides to arrive, and Naomi is quickly hunted down and shot by slave catchers moments after giving birth. From the afterlife, Naomi watches her daughter, named Josephine, grow up--longing for the lost chance to be a mother to her daughter. The novel, narrated by Naomi from this moment of her death, crisscrosses through time, cutting between past and present. This structure, which serves to distract from rather than add to the story, is the only weakness of the book. But this is a brave story, necessary and poignant; it is a story that demands to be heard. This is the violent, terrifying world of the antebellum South, where African-American women were prey and their babies sold like livestock. This is the story of mothers and daughters--of violence, absence, love, and legacies. Deon's vivid imagery, deft characterization, and spellbinding language carry the reader through this suspenseful tale. A haunting, visceral novel that heralds the birth of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

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April 15, 2016

This tale of horrific happenings spreads across two generations of a slave family, mother and daughter, in Alabama and Georgia. In 1847, Naomi is wrongfully accused of murder. She is pursued and dies while delivering light-skinned baby Josey, fathered by a white man. As a young woman, Josey is raped by a white man who comes back to take her again, but this time has to deal with Naomi, who has returned as a ghost to protect her child. By the end of the novel, Josey is safe, yet despite the Emancipation Proclamation, the same troubled relationships continue between blacks and whites in the South. There are moments of love in this harsh, affecting first novel, but the story mostly conveys the taking of personal freedom and human dignity. The presence of the apparition is fanciful, but it works well in bringing resolution to an imbalanced set of happenings. VERDICT A complicated read but worth the effort.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2016
Given the chance, Naomi, a 17-year-old slave in rural Alabama in 1848, would have named her daughter Grace, but she is shot and killed moments after giving birth. In her gripping debut novel, Deon, awarded a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, among other honors, dramatizes alliances formed by women in a violent place and time with adroit characterizations, a powerful narrative voice, and the propulsive plotting of a suspense novel. Kept lingering in the afterlife through her love for her daughter, Josey, Naomi tells the story in two intertwined strands. One traces her earlier life via flashbacks, covering her flight to Georgia after a deadly confrontation, her rescue by a female brothel owner with her own secretive past, and her falling in love with a white gambler. In the other, Naomi follows blonde, light-skinned Josey as she grows up before, during, and after emancipation, which hardly brings the liberty the former slaves hope for. Naomi's unique situation is movingly evoked: she offers Josey tender maternal advice, which goes unheard, and is unable to protect her from painful realities. Deon stays in control of her complex material, from its clever parallel structure to the women's psychological reactions to relentless tension. Readers will ache for these strong characters and yearn for them to find freedom and peace.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)