Pushed beyond their limits, the girls at last run away and the adults must work together to find them. The children's and adults' lives are complicated by various betrayals: Mae abuses Ramona's credit Ramona's boyfriend, Tyrone, finds comfort with another woman (while Ramona pines for Tyrone's father) and Mae's favorite cousin sexually assaults Shern. When an old criminal conviction denies custody of the girls to the aunts and uncles, the children are placed in a nightmarish foster home run by compulsive gambler Mae and her adult daughter, Ramona. Already fragile, Clarise is hospitalized with a breakdown. Soon, three beautiful daughters-Shern, Victoria and Bliss-complete their vision of bourgeois happiness, but the repeal of Jim Crow laws lures their best customers away to white catering chains, and Finch dies in a last-ditch effort to save his faltering business. Raised by her affectionate, idiosyncratic aunts and uncles after her mother's death, middle-class Clarise elopes with a poor but talented cook named Finch, and together they open their own successful catering business. With overreaching prose and overwhelming family tangles, McKinney-Whetstone's return to black Philadelphia, this time in the 1960s, never quite lives up to the promise of her debut, Tumbling. Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting. Such advertising cookies may enable such third-party vendors to serve ads to our readers. Some third-party vendors such as Google use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites. BookGorilla is published independently by Stephen Windwalker and Windwalker Media and is not endorsed by, Inc. This content is provided 'as is' and is subject to change or removal at any time. Certain content that appears on this website is provided by Amazon Services LLC.

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Diane mckinney whetstone