Rhythm & Booze
The Essential Etheridge Knight

The American Daughters

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • "A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."--The New York Times Book Review
  • Mya Dubois left Gauthier, Louisiana determined never to look back. Broadway gave her the career she dreamed of, but coming home means facing the one thing she cannot design her way around... the man who shattered her heart.
  • Rejected by her embittered mother and scorned by her classmates, Elnora Comstock seeks consolation in nature amid the wilds of eastern Indiana's Limberlost Swamp.
  • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.