Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2017
256 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.
In 1982, Evelyn's daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty he'll leave again.
Jackie's son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn't survive the storm. Fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over - until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.
For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants.
"Starred Review. In this fine debut, each generation comes with new possibilities and deferred dreams blossoming with the hope that this time, finally, those dreams may come to fruition." - Publishers Weekly
"Sexton's debut novel shows us that hard work does not guarantee success and that progress doesn't always move in a straight line. A well-crafted - and altogether timely - first novel." - Kirkus
"A brilliant mosaic of an African American family and a love song to New Orleans...written with deep insight and devastating honesty but also with grace and beauty." - Dana Johnson, author of Elsewhere, California
"Superb read! A compassionately told story of four generations in one American family who endure the unpredictable challenges of our rapidly changing society. Bound together through blood ties and love, Sexton's keenly drawn characters sweep you into a mesmerizing cascade of loss and triumph." - Carol Cassella, author of Oxygen, Healer, and Gemini
"In A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton delivers a fresh and unflinching portrait of African American life and establishes herself as a new and much-needed voice in literature. Vividly imagined and boldly told, A Kind of Freedom is a book for our time. A fierce and courageous debut." - Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar
"Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's A Kind of Freedom is a brilliant mosaic of an African American family and a love song to New Orleans ... Wilkerson's stunning debut illuminates the journey of sisters and the generations they bear, the hope they have for the future, and the future still strived for, still deferred, giving us all of this in razor-edged prose that cuts to the quick." - Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California
"Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's A Kind of Freedom is an elegant, captivating, and generous debut novel ... With seemingly effortless subtlety and command, Wilkerson Sexton delivers. A Kind of Freedom is multifaceted and beautiful." - Victoria Patterson, author of This Vacant Paradise and The Little Brother
"[Margaret Wilkerson Sexton] interweaves generations of parent-child relations to reveal, with sharp insight, how promise and possibility can sometimes yield to circumstances shaped by the limits to freedom." - Lauret Savoy, author of Trace
This information about A Kind of Freedom was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
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