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One could argue the story begins the night Allegra Douglass is awarded Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at her top-tier university in New York—the same night her grandmother dies—or before that: the day Allie left Birmingham and never looked back. Or even before that: the day her mother disappeared. But for our purposes Allie’s story begins at the end, when she is finally ready to tell her version of what happened with a white supremacist named Matthew Strong.
From the beginning, Allie had the clues: in a spate of possibly connected disappearances of other young Black women; in a series of recently restored plantation homes; in letters outlining an uprising; in maps of slave trade routes and old estates; in hidden caves and buried tunnels; and finally, in a confessional that should never have existed. They just have to make a case strong enough for the FBI and police to listen. This is when Allie herself disappears.
Allie is a survivor. She survived the newly post-Jim Crow south, she survived cancer, and she will survive being stalked and kidnapped by Matthew Strong, who seeks to ignite a revolution. The surprise in this doesn’t lie in the question of will she be taken; it lies in how she and her community outsmart a tactical madman.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 11, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781635422092
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781635422092
- File size: 2034 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 29, 2022
African American philosophy professor Allegra “Allie” Douglass, the narrator of this arresting first novel from professor Power-Greene (a specialist in African American social and political movements), is contacted by the NYPD when one of her grad students, Cynthia Wade, goes missing. Shortly thereafter, at a dinner celebrating her appointment to the Eli Jefferson Chair of Philosophy at New York’s Christopher Columbus University, she meets Jefferson’s nephew, Wallace, who comes off as a racist, and the even creepier Matthew Strong, who calls Allie “the smartest one of your kind.” That same evening, her grandmother dies in Alabama. Allie travels there for the funeral, where she focuses on her family and her late grandmother’s efforts to help a local group of mothers of missing girls and young women. Building on her grandmother’s work and the research of others for her grandmother, Allie finds connections to Cynthia’s disappearance. From the start, readers know Allie will eventually be kidnapped by Strong, who forces her “to write
his white supremacist mission to redeem the South.” The bad guys may be caricatures, but Power-Greene (Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement) tells a moving crime tale that’s all too timely. Agent: Sarah Bedingfield, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary.
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