A Sunday in June: A Novel

by Phyllis Alesia Perry

Overview

Now in paperback, an electrifying novel of love, brutality, and transcendence.

In a remarkable follow-up to her highly acclaimed first novel, Stigmata, Phyllis Alesia Perry chronicles the lives of three sisters who experience much more than the bond of family. Eva, Mary Nell, and Grace share with each other and with generations of their female ancestors the ability to see into the future and to remember the pain of the past, even of events long before their birth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786886890
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	02/16/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Phyllis Alesia Perry is an award-winning newspaper editor and author of the novel Stigmata. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Editorial Reviews

Perry is a careful storyteller, and the novel is well crafted. She has a gift for dialect; her characters speak simply and naturally, and their voices change as they age and as their circumstances change. Perry tenderly conveys the closeness of the small "colored" (to use the parlance of the day and the author's description) community of Johnson Creek, and the affection of the Mobleys for each other is palpable. She writes easily of the everyday, the commonplace: "The porch was barely cooler than the sunny yard, but that was where the Mobley women sat, where they always sat, their hands full of something that must be done, must be sewn, beaten, shelled, crocheted, cleaned, knitted." — Audrey Niffenegger

The Washington Post

Distinctive dialogue, evocative prose, and themes that encompass the legacy, Perry continues the mesmerizing story of the Mobley family.

Booklist

Phyllis Perry's characters wrap themselves around your heart.

Detroit News & Free Press

Second-novelist Perry (Stigmata, 1998) follows the fortunes and travails of an upwardly mobile African-American clan across much of the country and most of the 20th century. The saga opens in Johnson Creek, Alabama, in the early 1900s, when rural blacks live in a segregated world immensely harsher but in some ways far richer than that of their white neighbors. Frank and Joy Mobley are an unusual couple in many ways: Frank is an American Indian of the Creek tribe; Joy is the daughter of a woman born in Africa who lived most of her life as a slave. With 70 acres of good farmland and two houses, the Mobleys are quite well off by the standards of their black neighbors, and they have high expectations for their three daughters, Grace, Mary Nell, and Eva. But fate has a way of interfering. All three girls turn out to possess "the sight": they're given to visions, dreams, and aural hallucinations that offer them glimpses of the future. Frank and Joy do their best to discourage their daughters' belief in what they see as an embarrassing peasant superstition Joy's mother brought over from Africa, but the girls soon find themselves called upon for advice and prophecies and develop a small cult following in the region. Domestic life in a family of clairvoyants can be difficult, however, as Mary Nell discovers when she "sees" Eva being raped by her husband. Unable to bear children of her own, she counsels her sister to go through with the resulting pregnancy-and steals the baby boy after he's born. The siblings break up, reunite, and part again over the years, eventually making peace after a great deal of turmoil and heartbreak. The gift of the sight binds them in the end-to each other and to theirancestors. Despite an unwieldy narrative and overly intricate plot: an extremely readable and interesting portrait of a lost time and place.

Kirkus Reviews