Miss Abracadabra

<p><b>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.</b></p><p>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.</p><p>For twenty-five years, Tom Ross has been amassing the semi-autobiographical history of the extended Franklin family. <i>Miss Abracadabra</i> 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. </p>