Trading Dreams at Midnight: A Novel
Talented African American author McKinney-Whetstone returns after an absence of four years (Leaving Cecil Street, 2004) with another poignant, multigenerational story set in west Philadelphia. Thirty-six-year-old Neena has spent most of her adult years obsessively searching for her mentally ill mother, who abandoned Neena and her sister, Tish, when they were children. But Neena has run out of options. She has been financing her cross-country travels by engaging in affairs with married men and then blackmailing them, but her latest target not only refused to pay but also locked her out of her condo and cancelled her credit cards. Broke and exhausted, she returns to her hometown but learns that her sister has been hospitalized due to a problem with her pregnancy. She finds herself unable to face her strict, religious grandmother, Nan, who raised her. But over the following weeks, she finds comfort in the music of a mystical street musician and begins to seriously assess the cut-and-run pattern that has defined her life. An achingly tender portrait of familial love and pain. --Joanne Wilkinson