Mama Flora's Family: A Novel - Softcover

Haley, Alex

4.2

613 ratings by Goodreads

9780440235439: Mama Flora's Family: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044023543X ISBN 13: 9780440235439

Publisher: Dell, 1999

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She vowed to find a better world for her children. Even if she had to make it herself.

A sweeping epic of contemporary history by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Haley, this magnificent novel weaves an unforgettable story of one family, three generations, and their search for the American dream....

She is the heart and soul of her family who, through faith and courage, drives herself, her children, and her grandchildren onward, determined to propel them to a better place. Mama Flora, born to poor sharecroppers in Tennessee, is forced to raise her children alone after the murder of her husband. But it will not be Willie, her son, who fulfills her ambitions, but Ruthana, the niece she raises as her own. Inspired by her love for the radical poet Ben, Ruthana seeks her soul in Africa even as Willie's son and daughter embrace Black Power and drugs in their embattled coming-of-age. Throughout all the seasons of their lives, it is Mama Flora who prevails, whose quiet determination and love bring them back, as she leads her own quest for justice in tumultuous times.

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Review:

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, Alex Haley showed a masterful talent for dramatizing the triumphs and tragedies of African Americans and their families. This book--the basis for a 1998 CBS miniseries--was "cowritten" by David Stevens after Haley's death in 1992, telling the story of Flora, a black girl born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi who later moves to Memphis, Tennessee, where her husband, Booker, is killed by white landowners. Her son, Willie, moves to Chicago, fights in World War II, and marries, while Flora adopts her niece, Ruthauna, who later goes to college.

Those events in Mama Flora's life span the gap between 1912 and the modern era, and along the way, Haley depicts the Civil Rights-Black Power paradigm that caused disagreements in many black families. But, ultimately what Haley shows through Flora is the undying Afro-American belief in moral justice, and an ancestral drive for freedom that, in the case of Mama Flora's family, is strong enough even to withstand the ravages of drug abuse plaguing contemporary American families. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From the Back Cover:

"Heartwarming...affecting...Mama Flora herself is as memorable a character as Roots' Kunta Kinte."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Powerful and moving."
--The Boston Globe

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