Miss Abracadabra

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. Lorraine “Rain” Franklin—whose family made their way north as part of the Great Migration and have settled in the nearly all-white 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 hostile 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 25 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.