Events › Radical Reads: A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter

Radical Reads is an online book club focusing on literature that critiques and challenges current feminist topics. 

Join us on November 14 for a vibrant discussion of Michelle Porter's A Grandmother Begins the Story, which follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures.

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About the Book:

Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.

Allie, Carter's mother, is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife. 

And Geneviève is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without. 

Meanwhile, Mamé, in the Afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to cut herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward.

This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters—including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land—heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.

"None of the mothers in A Grandmother Begins The Story are perfect, but it's from these very imperfections that they draw their strength and figure out how to move forward, how to help the next generation, how to keep loving." - Ilana Masad, NPR

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