Miss Abracadabra

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.