Call Your Daughter Home: A Novel

by Deb Spera

Overview

Featured on Oprah’s Summer Reading List

For readers of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, this extraordinary historical debut novel follows three fierce Southern women in an unforgettable story of motherhood and womanhood.

It’s 1924 in Branchville, South Carolina and three women have come to a crossroads. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters. Retta, a first-generation freed slave, comes to Gertrude’s aid by watching her children, despite the gossip it causes in her community. Annie, the matriarch of the influential Coles family, offers Gertrude employment at her sewing circle, while facing problems of her own at home.

These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together. Told in the pitch-perfect voices of Gertrude, Retta, and Annie, Call Your Daughter Home is an emotional, timeless story about the power of family, community, and ferocity of motherhood.

“Like Jill McCorkle and Sue Monk Kidd, Spera probes the comfort and strength women find in their own company.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine

“A mesmerizing Southern tale…Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored.”
— Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780778309796
Publisher:	Park Row Books
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	87,912
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Deb Spera was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and lives in Los Angeles. She owns her own television company, One-Two Punch Productions, and has executive produced such shows as Criminal Minds and Army Wives. Her work’s been published in Sixfold, Garden and Gun, and Yoga Journal. CALL YOUR DAUGHTER HOME is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

"A mesmerizing Southern tale, Call Your Daughter Home follows three women intertwined in struggle, unlikely friendship, and ultimately, redemption. Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored. This book kept me up late and stayed with me long after I closed the final page." -Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours

"Deb Spera is a master of voice, a master of deep-diving access to the roiling depths of human identity. These three women, in their fierce struggle for values and self, speak to those struggles in all of us, men and women both. Call Your Daughter Home is an exhilarating and important book."
- Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"Deb Spera is an amazing talent, and a powerful female voice. She channels the women in this gripping novel - Gertrude, Oretta, and Annie - like someone who has lived inside them. I cannot recommend it strongly enough."
-Mark Bowden, New York Times and International bestselling author of Black Hawk Down

"Call Your Daughter Home is a stunning and welcome addition to Southern Literature. Set in South Carolina during the 20s, it tells a powerful story of women, family, class, and race."
-Chris Offutt, Author of Country Dark

"A ferociously moving story of motherhood and justice, relayed through a trio of radiantly unforgettable voices. Deb Spera is a conjurer of the first rank."
-Jonathan Miles, New York Times bestselling author of Dear American Airlines and Want Not

"Call Your Daughter Home is a bold and mesmerizing debut set in a time and place lost to history; a world rescued now by Deb Spera, a talented storyteller. With lush language, Spera illuminates a powerful story of women, of motherhood and survival."
-Natashia Deón, Author of Grace

From the Publisher

Winter 2018

Three women in 1924 South Carolina confront injustice in their small town. There's Gertrude, fearing death at the hand of an abusive husband; Retta, a first-generation freed slave still working for the family who once owned hers; and Annie, matriarch of that family. A debut compared to Ayana Mathis's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

Robin Miles, Adenrele Ojo, and Brittany Pressley team up to narrate this audiobook about three unforgettable mothers in South Carolina in 1924. Miles voices Annie, a plantation owner’s wife and businesswoman in her own right, with a regal, prideful tone and clear enunciation. Ojo voices Retta, a first-generation freed slave, with tenacious righteousness, a perfect complement to her firm but generous nature. Pressley voices Gertrude, an impoverished and battered mother of four, with a hint of vocal fry that precisely reflects her harsh life. Pressley’s narration of children’s voices is particularly admirable and realistic—she sounds like a completely different person altogether. A wonderful, varied cast brings three seemingly unrelated women together in ways they never expected. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

Robin Miles, Adenrele Ojo, and Brittany Pressley team up to narrate this audiobook about three unforgettable mothers in South Carolina in 1924. Miles voices Annie, a plantation owner’s wife and businesswoman in her own right, with a regal, prideful tone and clear enunciation. Ojo voices Retta, a first-generation freed slave, with tenacious righteousness, a perfect complement to her firm but generous nature. Pressley voices Gertrude, an impoverished and battered mother of four, with a hint of vocal fry that precisely reflects her harsh life. Pressley’s narration of children’s voices is particularly admirable and realistic—she sounds like a completely different person altogether. A wonderful, varied cast brings three seemingly unrelated women together in ways they never expected. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

2019-03-04

In South Carolina in the 1920s, three memorable women struggle with challenging family relationships amid the depths of the Depression in this impressive first novel.

Spera's debut weaves together the stories of Annie Coles, matriarch of a white, plantation-owning family; Oretta Bootles, Annie's black housekeeper; and Gertrude Pardee, a young white woman who has fled a brutally abusive husband and their isolated, ramshackle home. The trio comes together in the small town of Branchville; one thing they have in common is fraught relationships with their daughters. Annie has been estranged for 15 years from her two adult daughters, for reasons only slowly revealed. Retta still grieves for her only child, a beloved girl who died at age 8. Gertrude is trying simply to keep her four young girls alive, given their grinding poverty, and away from their father and, in the case of the older daughters, from lusty boys. The first-person narration alternates among the three main characters, and Spera deftly creates distinctive voices for each one. The novel is rich with details about the hard physical work and emotional resilience demanded of women in the rural South almost a hundred years ago. It also makes no bones about marriage in that time. As Retta says, "When a woman marries and takes her husband's name she is forever bound by his action and not her own. It ain't right, but that's the way it is." Retta has a warm and loving marriage despite the fact her husband was badly injured in a work accident. Gertrude and Annie are not so lucky; each of them must reckon with husbands capable of terrible things. The novel's plot can sometimes veer toward melodrama and even overload, as when a raging diphtheria epidemic, the revelation of a criminal secret, and a hurricane all happen at once. But Spera's sure-footed depictions of women's friendships and mother-daughter relationships are the book's strengths.

A story of strong women pushed to extremes succeeds with convincing characters and a vivid portrait of the rural South a century ago.

Kirkus Reviews