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Miss Abracadabra

Tom Ross

$42.95

Paperback

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English
Deep Vellum Publishing
23 April 2025
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 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.

For twenty-five 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.
By:  
Imprint:   Deep Vellum Publishing
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 215mm,  Width: 139mm, 
ISBN:   9781646053544
ISBN 10:   1646053540
Pages:   375
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Tom Ross writes about family history, using autobiographical elements as a point of fictional departure. He is a statistician in New York. ""(I Am) a Very Stylish Girl,"" a chapter-length excerpt of Miss Abracadabra, was published in Raritan Quarterly. Miss Abracadabra is his first book.

Reviews for Miss Abracadabra

""Miss Abracadabra: As the World Turns fulfills the challenge and demand Toni Morrison once named for American literature as ‘a non-racist, racialized account of human experience’ . . . Tom Ross accurately recreates on the page a pitch-perfect rendering of American racism narrated and experienced beyond the self-reproducing, self-defeating, limiting, and finally dead-end confines of racism’s psychologically deforming affects and effects."" —Peter Dimock, author of Daybook from Sheep Meadow


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