Half a heart
By: Rosellen Brown
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
Subjects: Women civil rights workers -- Fiction.; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.; Racially mixed people -- Fiction.; Illegitimate children -- Fiction.; Teenage girls -- Fiction.; Birthmothers -- Fiction.; Houston (Tex.) -- Fiction.; New England -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston during the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter born in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Hot tempered, sensitive, manipulative and deeply hurt at her mother's disappearance from her life, Ronnee has been raised by her father, a formerly brilliant college professor who forbade her to see her white mother. Half a Heart charts the emotionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and loyalty. With which family, and which race, does she identify? How does all this affect her relationships with her newly discovered half-sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against? Half a Heart is a searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed and hopes reignited by one of our foremost novelists.