Phoebe: A Novel

Doctors warned the Canady family that the pregnancy was too dangerous to carry. Phoebe was born anyway — barely two pounds, months too early, already refusing to let go.She grows up in a crowded New York household, under a mother whose love comes edged with cruelty. At fourteen she runs — a packed backpack, a subway out of the only home she knows — the first of many times she chooses escape over endurance. She fights for an education in a Harlem classroom carved from an abandoned brownstone. She marries young, into a household ruled by a man who picks even the clothes she wears, and learns that a marriage can become its own kind of cage — one that nearly costs her life.Then, with her children beside her, Phoebe does the bravest thing she knows: she boards a bus heading west, toward a coast she has never seen and a life that might, at last, be her own.From a hard New York childhood to the California shore, Phoebe is an intimate, unflinching novel of survival, motherhood, and the long fight to be free — for readers of The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Vanishing Half. Read more