# February 2023 Reading Wrap Up
The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.
Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, in debt, and unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.
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A stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives—set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco.
At home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore.
Now Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, who promises to catapult The Salvations into the national spotlight. Vivian knows this is the big break she’s been praying for. But sometime between the hours of rehearsal on their rooftop and the weekly gigs at the Champagne Supper Club, the girls have become women, women with dreams that their mother cannot imagine.
The neighborhood is changing, too: all around the Fillmore, white men in suits are approaching Black property owners with offers. One sister finds herself called to fight back, one falls into the comfort of an old relationship, another yearns to make her own voice heard. And Vivian, who has always maintained control, will have to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter: the community, The Salvations, and even her family.
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Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s wildly original debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body, follows pregnant, unmarried Billy Beede and her down-and-out family in 1960s.
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Getting Mother’s Body is a novel set in Texas, where characters search for buried jewels that allegedly belong to Billy’s late mother, Willa Mae. The book is described as a worthy successor to the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. It brings hard-luck characters to life in an ingenious and uproarious manner, making author Suzan-Lori Parks stand out as a writer.
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Ravi Howard‘s debut novel is based on a true story of a modern-day lynching in America. The book exposes a tragic chapter in the history of the American South, specifically in Mobile, Alabama. The story revolves around the murder of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald, whose body was found badly beaten and hanging from a tree. The Deacon brothers, Paul and Roy, are tasked with burying their friend and classmate, an experience that deeply impacts them. The novel delves into the city’s first lynching in over sixty years, highlighting racial inequalities in the New South.
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