Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart, which marks the debut of a wonderfully gifted new storyteller, weighs the effect of Clara”s absence on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and the new world of the city, to which they have moved in search of a better life for themselves and their children; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family in the Georgetown neighborhood they now call home; and, most especially, Clara”s sister, ten-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister”s death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become. This highly accomplished first novel resonates with ideas, impassioned lyricism, and poignant historical detail as it captures an essential part of the African-American experience in our century.
Time – Walter Kirn
Breena Clarke”s accomplished first novel River, Cross My Heart is the sluggish brown Potomac, benevolent on the surface but treacherous beneath. It”s the 1920s Johnnie Mae Bynum and her sister Clara are forced to use the river as swimming hole owing to a race ban at their local pool. Things are supposed to be more sophisticated, more advance, but then the river suddenly takes the life of little Clara, which the Bynum are forced back on their durable old-country ways. Clarke has written a novel that is all about change, but gradual change: the kind that transforms people”s lives while they”re preoccupied with the daily chores. This story flows quietly but carves deep channels in the reader”s mind.
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