Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

This is a multigenerational story about black families that is set more in culture than strictly in poverty (although, don't get me wrong, there is plenty of poverty here). The novel spans the 1940s through the mid-2000s, and the story is driven through the narratives of great-grandmother Evelyn and her three-generation lineage of daughters: Charlotte, Corinna and Camille. For much of the novel, Evelyn is present only through memories. Charlotte’s mothering of Corinna and Corinna’s mothering of Camille take center stage. It is about inadequate parenting and then downstream consequences of kicking your child out rather than believing them, about the value in getting over your wounded pride, and how trauma reverberates across generations. Evelyn is the catalyst — she never quite wanted the role of mother to begin with. Thrust into raising Charlotte, Evelyn wrestled with a desire to balance motherhood with pursuing her own professional endeavors. Their mother-daughter bond, or lack thereof, resulted in Charlotte needing to leave her home to focus on her life as a young mother. She and her daughter live in poverty as a result, and Corinna reaches out to Evelyn for her daughter Camille's sake. Camille serves as the bridge to her family’s matrilineal reconciliation. She carries the weight of generations past, and yet has deep responsibility to carve a new life for herself that includes empathy, hope and unapologetically living out her dreams.