Tomorrow's Bread

Name: Tomorrow's Bread
Brand: HighBridge Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Anna Jean Mayhew
ISBN: 9781684417797

Author: Anna Jean Mayhew

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Unabridged: 8 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Highbridge Audio

Published: 03/26/2019

Categories: Fiction, Family Life

Synopsis

In 1961 Charlotte, North Carolina, the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn is a bustling city within a city. Self-contained and vibrant, it has its own restaurants, schools, theaters, churches, and night clubs. There are shotgun shacks and poverty, along with well-maintained houses like the one Loraylee Hawkins shares with her young son, Hawk, her Uncle Ray, and her grandmother, Bibi. Loraylee's love for Archibald Griffin, Hawk's white father and manager of the cafeteria where she works, must be kept secret in the segregated South.

Loraylee has heard rumors that the city plans to bulldoze her neighborhood, claiming it's dilapidated and dangerous. The government promises to provide new housing and relocate businesses. But locals like Pastor Ebenezer Polk, who's facing the demolition of his church, know the value of Brooklyn does not lie in bricks and mortar. Generations have lived, loved, and died here, supporting and strengthening each other. Yet street by street, longtime residents are being forced out. And Loraylee, searching for a way to keep her family together, will form new alliances—and find an unexpected path that may yet lead her home.

About Anna Jean Mayhew

Anna Jean (A. J.) Mayhew's first novel, The Dry Grass of August, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Book Award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She has been writer-in-residence at Moulin a Nef Studio Center in Auvillar, France, and was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers' Network. A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, A. J. has never lived outside the state, although she often travels to Europe with her Swiss-born husband. Her work reflects her vivid memories of growing up in the segregated South. A. J.-a mother and grandmother-now lives in a small town in the North Carolina Piedmont with her husband and their French-speaking cat.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara

Often there are many terms to describe the same thing: city revitalization, urban renewal, gentrification, facelifting. Often, too, the terms disguise what is actually meant: low income neighborhood demolition, slum clearance. Little thought is given to the destruction of a community, not just homes......more

Goodreads review by Pam

In the 1960s, under the guise of a program called "urban renewal," the nation bulldozed hundreds of black neighborhoods, destroying communities and undermining hard-won racial progress. Anna Jean Mayhew sets her page-turning novel in one of these now-lost communities, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ch......more

Goodreads review by Mary

There's not much by way of plot in this book, despite the fact the main characters are facing the biggest change of their lives. There's this feeling though, that things are building within subplots, only to kind of fizzle out. The graveyard "mystery" doesn't ever feel "solved," while the relationsh......more

Goodreads review by Sue

In the early 60s, many large cities started a plan called urban renewal - it was a way to make space for the new large buildings that they planned in the future. In many places, urban renewal meant displacement of the people who lived in the neighborhoods that were being destroyed to make way for th......more