Search - Cane River

Yes! This was an Oprah pick...but forget that. This is a great book anyway.

I spent the entire day listening to this 6 hour audio as I walked and gardened, then just sat on the stoop doing nothing but listening. Perhaps it was the readers, Shari Belafonte, Jo Marie Payton, and Edwina Moore, who seemed to take a generation each to read about. They breathed such life into the characters, such love and determination into their lives. Depressing--well, all Oprah books seem to be, at least those I've read. But this book was different. Of course it had its depressing moments, after all, a book about Black women set in the south during the 1800's would be, but then along would come these scenes that would lift you right out of that misery. Make you so proud and make you wish you knew these women.

Multigenerational, it somewhat reminded me of Roots, with the focus all upon the women.

And something I found very neat: the author, Lalita Tademy, did an introduction where she admitted that after finding the documents and such of these relatives, when she decided to write the story, she did not hesitate to use her imagination where things could not be proved.

Amazing story...very moving and disturbing!

Very interesting. From Back Cover: This is a epic novel of four generations of African-American women, a work based on the author's acutal past. It is on a medium sized Creole plantation owned by a family name Derbanne that the stories of four astonishing women who battled vast injustices to creat a legacy of hope and achievement come to life. They were women whose lives began in slavery, who weathered the Civil War, and who grappled with the contracictions of emancipation through the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. Through it all, they fought to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. Amid small farmhouses and a tightly knit community of Frency-speaking slaves, free people of color, and whites, Tademy'ds great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth would bear both a proud heritage and the yoke of slavery. Her youngest daughter Suzette, would be the first to discover the promise-and heartbreak-of freedom. Suzette's strong-willed daughter Philomene would use determination born of tragedy to reunite her family and gain unheard-of economic independence. And Emily, Philomene's spirited daughter, would fight to secure her children's just due and preserve their future against dangerous odds.