Rating: ****
Tags: Oprah's Book Club, Historical, Fiction, Lang:en
Summary
The newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0
selection: this special eBook edition of The Twelve Tribes of
Hattie by Ayana Mathis features exclusive content, including
Oprah’s personal notes highlighted within the text, and a
reading group guide. The arrival of a major new voice in
contemporary fiction. A debut of extraordinary distinction:
Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great
Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. In
1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and
settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life.
Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but
disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins
succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.
Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with
grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.
She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are
sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will
not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in
twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story
of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a
nation. Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The
Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to
last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and
blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a
searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable
adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the
human spirit and the driving force of the American dream.