About this book
Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston during the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter born in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Hot tempered, sensitive, manipulative and deeply hurt at her mother's disappearance from her life, Ronnee has been raised by her father, a formerly brilliant college professor who forbade her to see her white mother. Half a Heart charts the emotionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and loyalty. With which family, and which race, does she identify? How does all this affect her relationships with her newly discovered half-sister, her white boyfriend, and the father she is rebelling against? Half a Heart is a searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed and hopes reignited by one of our foremost novelists.
Subjects
FictionBirthmothersTeenage girlsRacially mixed peopleMothers and daughtersWomen civil rights workersIllegitimate childrenLarge type booksUpper class familiesRacially mixed childrenIdentity (Psychology)Fiction, generalHouston (tex.), fictionTexas, fictionNew england, fictionMothers and daughters, fictionNew York Times reviewedLiterature, modern, history and criticism, 20th century