Miss Black America: A Novel

Veronica Chambers

Dec 2007 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

A dazzling fiction debut from the author of Mama’s Girl, Miss Black America is the warm and tender story of Angela, a young girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. Angela goes to school one ordinary day and returns home to find her glamorous and fiercely independent mother gone. Her magician father, Teddo, left to raise Angela alone, insists on keeping Melanie’s disappearance shrouded in mystery. As Angela grows to womanhood and struggles to understand her mother’s motivation for escaping the bonds of her family, she wryly observes, “My father was a magician, but my mother was the real Houdini.”

A universal story that is both finely tuned and elegant, Miss Black America captures the intricacies, pleasures, contradictions, and complexities at the heart of every family. Spare and finely told, this novel will seep beneath your skin and stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

About the author

VERONICA CHAMBERS is the author of Having It All? and Mama’s Girl. She was formerly a culture writer for Newsweek, a staff writer at Premiere magazine, and an executive editor of Savoy magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to Glamour; O, The Oprah Magazine; the New York Times; and other publications. The daughter of a magician, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband.