Call Your Daughter Home Spiral-Bound | 2020-04-07
Deb Spera
★★★★☆+
Call Your Daughter Home
For readers of The Kitchen House and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Call Your Daughter Home is an emotionally resonant and stunning tour de force that follows three fierce, unforgettable Southern women in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
Featured on Oprah's Summer Reading List
For readers of Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, this extraordinary historical debut novel follows three fierce Southern women in an unforgettable story of motherhood and womanhood.
It's 1924 in Branchville, South Carolina and three women have come to a crossroads. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters. Retta, a first-generation freed slave, comes to Gertrude's aid by watching her children, despite the gossip it causes in her community. Annie, the matriarch of the influential Coles family, offers Gertrude employment at her sewing circle, while facing problems of her own at home.
These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together. Told in the pitch-perfect voices of Gertrude, Retta, and Annie, Call Your Daughter Home is an emotional, timeless story about the power of family, community, and ferocity of motherhood.
"Like Jill McCorkle and Sue Monk Kidd, Spera probes the comfort and strength women find in their own company."
-- O, The Oprah Magazine
"A mesmerizing Southern tale…Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored."
-- Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours
"Like Jill McCorkle and Sue Monk Kidd, Spera probes the comfort and strength women find in their own company."--O Magazine
"Full-of-heart debut."--Garden & Gun
"Spera's sure-footed depictions of women's friendships and mother-daughter relationships are the book's strengths."--Kirkus Reviews
"A mesmerizing story of motherhood and womanhood."--Deep South
"Call Your Daughter Home succeeds in painting an atmospheric portrait of the pre-Depression South." --NPR.org
"A mesmerizing Southern tale, Call Your Daughter Home follows three women intertwined in struggle, unlikely friendship, and ultimately, redemption. Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored. This book kept me up late and stayed with me long after I closed the final page."
--Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours
"Deb Spera is a master of voice, a master of deep-diving access to the roiling depths of human identity. These three women, in their fierce struggle for values and self, speak to those struggles in all of us, men and women both. Call Your Daughter Home is an exhilarating and important book."
--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"Call Your Daughter Home is a stunning and welcome addition to Southern Literature. Set in South Carolina during the 20s, it tells a powerful story of women, family, class, and race."
--Chris Offutt, Author of Country Dark
"Call Your Daughter Home is a bold and mesmerizing debut set in a time and place lost to history; a world rescued now by Deb Spera, a talented storyteller. With lush language, Spera illuminates a powerful story of women, of motherhood and survival."
--Natashia Deón, Author of Grace
"Deb Spera is an amazing talent, and a powerful female voice. She channels the women in this gripping novel -- Gertrude, Oretta, and Annie -- like someone who has lived inside them. I cannot recommend it strongly enough."
--Mark Bowden, New York Times and International bestselling author of Black Hawk Down
"A ferociously moving story of motherhood and justice, relayed through a trio of radiantly unforgettable voices. Deb Spera is a conjurer of the first rank."
--Jonathan Miles, New York Times bestselling author of Dear American Airlines and Want Not
Bookseller Blurbs
"Fans of Mudbound and The Secret Life of Bees are going to embrace Call Your Daughter Home."
--Pamela Klinger-Horn, Excelsior Bay Books
"From the moment I was crouching alongside Gertrude in the heat of an alligator infested swamp, I was hooked by her story, just as I would be upon being introduced to the other two main narrators - big hearted Retta still mourning the death of her little girl, and Annie, isolated by her tyrannical wealthy husband. Together, they tell of their rural lives in a southern town, just after the Civil War, where race and gender are a mighty burden, and where women, despite their station or class, reach out to nurture, keep vigil, and rescue one another. This is a very fine novel with great depth, terrific writing and characters whose faces I will never forget."
--Nancy Scheemaker, Northshire Books
"Sit back and enjoy. This southern novel of family, secrets, and redemption should be at the top of your reading stack. Gertrude, Annie, and Retta narrate this absorbing tale set among the secrets of a small town. These women are fierce. They are ready to sacrifice all for their families."
--Valerie Koehler, Blue Willow Bookshop