African American Women Writers

Karen E. Quinones Miller returns to her beloved Harlem to spin a dynamic tale that sparkles with the blush of first love and the hard-won lessons that endure." "Eighteen-year-old college student Tiara Bynum" is as pretty as a princess and just as spoiled. Her castle is the Harlem housing project where she lives with her younger sister, Jo-Jo, and her doting father, Reggie. Her fiefdom is the legion of men at her beck and call every time she snaps her perfectly manicured fingers. She has no qualms about flaunting her charms to get what she wants because she's "got it like that." Reggie -- a former professional gambler who was abandoned by his wife -- would do anything for his daughters, even if it means jeopardizing the family finances in favor of his girls' material happiness. Though Reggie's sister, Charlene -- a woman embittered by a disfiguring car accident -- pleads for restraint, her Thursday "family nights" pale in comparison to Reggie's Knicks tickets and shopping sprees. Blissfully unaware of the recklessness of her father's splurges, Tiara believes she's the toast of the world. Her great

An engaged literary agent finds her relationship with her twin sister threatened by the secret that her twin and stepfather had consensual sexual relations.

You'd be angry, too, if you grew up poorer than poor in Harlem in the 1960s and '70s, a place of unrelenting violence, racism, crime, rape, scamming, drinking, and drugging. Living with a dad permanently checked out in Bellevue and a mom at the end of her rope raising you, your twin sister, and your two brothers, moving every time the money runs out--and doing what it takes to survive. But there's more to her story. Ke-Ke Quinones was whip smart and sassy, a voracious reader of everything from poetry to the classics. No matter what, 117th Street--where you could always count on someone to stand up for you--would always be home. And with every hard-knock lesson learned, Ke-Ke grew fiercer, unleashing her inner angry-ass black woman to get through it all. Decades later, comatose in a hospital bed after a medical crisis, she reflects on her life--her success as a journalist and renowned author, her tragicomic memories of Harlem, her turbulent marriage, the birth of her daughter, future possibilities--all the while surrounded by her splintered family in all of their sound and fury. Will she rise above once more?