Rhythm & Booze
The Essential Etheridge Knight

The American Daughters

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Skillfully weaving together oral narratives, archival research, existing published histories, and his own family's recollections and stories, Aamaawia John Bickers illustrates the broader strategies and forces that affected how the Miami Nation responded to American imperial expansion, illuminating the challenges, achievements, and occasional missteps along the way.
  • When Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke returns from war to find his beloved Southwestern desert threatened by industrial development, it’s up to him to take the noxious bull by the horns.
  • With admirable scholarship, Mrs. Brooks has traced the background of conflict, analyzed the emotional climate at the time, pointed up the social and military organization in Utah, and revealed the forces which culminated in the great tragedy at Mountain Meadows.
  • Douglass begins by saying that he does not know his birthday and this bothers him.