![]() ![]() ![]() Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection. Tempest Rising by Diane McKinney-Whetstone. As the threat looms of a highway to be built through the church-centered neighborhood, individual characters find their fates, and the delicately passionate narrative coalesces around a soul-galvanizing metaphor of bricks and mortar and spirit. Fannie's prescient visions and her wish to stave off the inevitable underscore an ambivalent view of the power of change. ![]() Many women struggle in private against pain-especially Liz, who hides in the closet and eats plaster to deal with what she knows about Herbie and Ethel. When newborn Fannie and, five years later, Ethel's five-year-old orphan niece, Liz, are abandoned on Noon and Herbie's doorstep, the embrace of community allows the creation of a family. Noon is a Florida preacher's daughter too scarred from a secret childhood incident to let a man touch her her husband, Herbie, is a redcap who met her when he was a hepcat jazz drummer touring with fiery singer Ethel. A gentle portrait of an African American community in South Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s, the story probes beneath its residents' lives to tell a powerful tale of damage and healing. Sunday morning in South Philly, according to McKinney-Whetstone, is ""like buttermilk,"" with ""a quiet smoothness to it."" The same can be said of this remarkable first novel. ![]()
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