By Tom Ross
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.
Publication Date: January 14th, 2025
Paperback ISBN: 9781646053544
eBook ISBN: 9781646053667
Description
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.
Biographical Note
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