In lyrical, unconstrained prose, debut author Tom Ross tells a story of intergenerational change and conflict in a Black American family in the pre-Civil Rights era.

Lorraine "Rain" Franklin-whose family made their way north as part of the Great Migration and have settled in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York-is lost. She stumbles through a series of questionable romantic encounters and assumed identities, and eventually into an unplanned pregnancy, struggling both to define herself in and against a fallen world and to achieve autonomy from her mother's repressive anxieties. Rain's misadventures are a parable of what it means to confront, however imperfectly, the contradictions of a Black community defining itself in midcentury America.

For twenty-five years, Tom Ross has been amassing the semi-autobiographical history of the extended Franklin family. Miss Abracadabra is the culmination and first extended publication from this astonishing storytelling project, which-through multiple viewpoints-fractures and reconfigures historical experience into infinite narrative possibilities.

About the Author

Tom Ross writes about family history, using autobiographical elements as a point of fictional departure. He is a statistician in New York. "(I Am) a Very Stylish Girl," a chapter-length excerpt of Miss Abracadabra, was published in Raritan Quarterly. Miss Abracadabra is his first book.

Reviews

"Miss Abracadabra: As the World Turns fulfills the challenge and demand Toni Morrison once named for American literature as 'a non-racist, racialized account of human experience' . . . Tom Ross accurately recreates on the page a pitch-perfect rendering of American racism narrated and experienced beyond the self-reproducing, self-defeating, limiting, and finally dead-end confines of racism's psychologically deforming affects and effects." -Peter Dimock, author of Daybook from Sheep Meadow

Book Information
ISBN 9781646053544
Author Tom Ross
Format Paperback
Page Count 375
Imprint Deep Vellum Publishing
Publisher Deep Vellum Publishing