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    Solemn
    Solemn
    Solemn
    Audiobook11 hours

    Solemn

    Written by Kalisha Buckhanon

    Narrated by Cherise Boothe

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half-sibling: the outcome of her father's mistakes with a married woman who lives in their trailer park. After Solemn witnesses a man throw the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed. As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother's wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated baby's doomed mother disappears without a trace. Solemn remains trapped by connections to the missing other woman and an honest cop who suspects more to the story than others on the small local police force want to see. When her father's next mistake - a robbery - lands Solemn in a group home for troubled girls, she meets a Chicago delinquent who wants to escape. There, Solemn must face the truth of who she really is and what she is really made of.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9781501926112
    Solemn
    Author

    Kalisha Buckhanon

    Kalisha Buckhanon’s first novel, Upstate, won an American Library Association Alex Award and was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Debut Fiction. Terry McMillan selected her to receive the first Terry McMillan Young Author Award in 2006. A recipient of a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship and an Andrew Mellon Fellow, Buckhanon frequently teaches writing and speaks throughout the country. She has a M.F.A. in creative writing from New School University in New York City, and both a B.A. and a M.A. in English language and literature from the University of Chicago. She was born in 1977 in Kankakee, Illinois.

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    Reviews for Solemn

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      This is a rather odd book. The premise sounded interesting, but the execution left something to be desired. Solemn Redvine is a girl growing up in Mississiippi. She lives in a trailer park that time forgot, which seems to lack basic running water, among other things. Her father is a notorious theif and philanderer, and possibly a murderer. Solemn thinks she saw him throw his mistress's baby down the trailer park's well. She makes friends with a neighbor, but then a lightning storm challenges that friendship. The baby's mother disappears and Solemn is determined to find her. To cope with it all, Solemn retreats into a world of dreams and fantasy, which are recounted in the book. I found they added little and were mostly a distraction. This is just the first half of the book. In the second half Solemn goes with her father to rob a house, and ends up getting all the blame (which her father is happy to let her take). She's then sent to a reformatory, and that's about it. This book had a winding, meandering, not well-connected plot. I was shocked to discover it was set in the late 20th century, as it reads like something more from the 40s or the 50s. In any case, while there were really compelling elements, this book was too all over the place to keep my attention.