Promise
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Promise
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Narrated by:
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Imani Parks
About this listen
Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the civil right movement sweeps the nation.
The people of Salt Point are afraid of the world beyond their rural town. Most of them are born, live and die never having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that are crammed with generations of their families. But something shifts at the end of summer 1957. Change makes its way to Salt Point.
The Kindred sisters - Ezra and Cinthy - grew up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs.
But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra's best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as a threat to their way of life. Amidst escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they've built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.
In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family's story of resistance. It's an audiobook that will break your heart - and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.
©2023 Rachel Eliza Griffiths (P)2023 Penguin AudioCritic Reviews
"Promise is forged in a crucible of irrational violence and darkness that paradoxically gives birth to luminous, resilient love. This is a novel so potent, written in such transcendent prose, one wonders if it's secretly a magic spell. It's a stunning achievement." (Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss)
"This is a magical, magnificent novel that amounts to a secret history of an America we think we know but never really knew, where girls reckon with the beauty and terror of girlhood, mortal black bodies reckon with immortal black souls, while America reckons with the terror of its beastly, bloody self. The trajectories collide - how could they not - and the result bowls us over with shock and grief, but eventually fills our hearts with awe and wonder." (Marlon James, author A Brief History of Seven Killings)
"At its core, Promise concerns the illusion of security that we, Black Americans, harbor in our souls; that generational ache to believe that we can finally lay down the fear of what potential tragedy awaits us around the next corner, and the one after that. Poetic and powerful, this book slices through self-delusion with its many faces of heroism, loss, and the grace it takes to find a sense of equality in our hearts." (Walter Mosley, New York Times-bestselling author of Every Man Every King)