03538cam a2200469 i 4500 1004797298 TxAuBib 20231010120000.0 221219s2023||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2022058917 9780525519935 hardcover 0525519939 hardcover (OCoLC)1397338135 DLC eng rda DLC TnLvILS TxAuBib rda Mathis, Ayana, author Unsettled. The unsettled / Ayana Mathis. First edition. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. 311 pages ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier "This is a Borzoi book"--Copyright page. "From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. 20231010. African American families Fiction. African American women Fiction. Mother-son relationship Fiction. Mothers and sons Fiction. Mother-daughter relationship Fiction. Mothers and daughters Fiction. Abnormal psychology Fiction. Psychic trauma Fiction. Homelessness Fiction. Shelters for the homeless Fiction. Philadelphia (Pa) Fiction. Pennsylvania Fiction. Alabama Fiction. Historical fiction. Social problem fiction. Domestic fiction.