num_pages: 304
description: It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough complicated and loyal women presided over by her mother Lula and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever. Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine--a mixed-blood Cherokee woman-- and her daughter Reney as they move from Eastern Oklahoma's Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However life in Texas isn't easy and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River we see their struggle to survive in a world--of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces like wildfires and tornados--intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.In lush and empathic prose Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud stubborn Cherokee women sacrifice for those they love amid larger forces of history religion class and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.
language: None
title: Crooked Hallelujah
publisher: Grove/Atlantic