One Blood

This is a heart-warming, emotional story taking you through multiple generations of women and their stories. I loved seeing each woman's lives unfold and how they traverse different trials and tribulations throughout their lives. It was also really interesting to see how each woman saw each other through their eyes and finally seeing the crossover. I think One Blood holds a sweet important message about the importance of family and the connections you hold with your mother.

In "One Blood," Denene Millner delivers a poignant and powerful exploration of motherhood, family secrets, and the enduring bonds that connect generations. Set against the backdrop of the Great Migration and spanning decades of social change, this novel weaves together the stories of three women whose lives are intricately entwined.

Grace, the birth mother, experiences the pain of losing her child to adoption and the lifelong impact of that heart-wrenching separation. Delores, the adoptive mother, grapples with her own past and is willing to go to great lengths to protect her dreams and loved ones. And Rae, the daughter to both, embarks on a journey of self-discovery when she learns the truth about her adoption and faces the challenges of impending motherhood.

Millner's prose is potent and poetic, capturing the emotions and experiences of these women with depth and sensitivity. The narrative moves seamlessly through time, offering glimpses into the struggles and triumphs of Black motherhood across generations. Through themes of love, loss, and healing, the author delves into the complexities of generational trauma and the power of resilience.

"One Blood" is a beautifully wrought novel that pays homage to Black motherhood and explores the lasting impact of family secrets. Millner's storytelling is captivating, immersing readers in the lives of these vibrant and relatable characters. This book is a hymn to the strength and love of Black women, and a testament to the enduring power of family ties.

With its blend of historical context, emotional depth, and heartfelt storytelling, "One Blood" is a compelling and resonant read that will leave a lasting impression. Denene Millner's masterful storytelling shines in this exploration of motherhood and the unbreakable connections that bind us all.

Three women. One birth mother. One adoptive mother. And the daughter of both.

Over several decades, the secrets that these women keep, the way their lives are shaped for them, the contrast between public face and private pain, all laid bare in this multi-generational tale

Wow - what a book. I found it was the sort of story I had to sit with afterwards to really take in everything I'd read. I really enjoyed the multi-POV timeline, as well as the themes of motherhood and secrets.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this five star book.

I loved this book even though it is so very sad and obviously very real. Sadness flows through the story from beginning to end almost but it is a book everyone should read and possibly learn from in our day to day lives. The story is told in three parts by three black woman trying to make a life in rural South and then in the city and dealing with racism along the way. Delores Grace and Rae are the main characters and the three parts of the book tell their particular tragedy and how eventually they interwine as a family. I thought the characters were given interesting leads but as I have said the book itself is a hard read but a must read. The book really hones in on abuse, advantage and just how difficult life can be for the disadvantaged and how they try and better themselves and succeed in a small way. The Acknowledgements at the back of the book made interesting reading and gave an insight into parts of the story line. Please read this book as it is uplifting as well as sad

What an amazing book! Very moving and sad but wonderful stories these women tell. Extremely well written. I would highly recommend it.

This novel follows group of black women through time, showing the effects of racism on the lives of black women in the 60s and 70s in America . The novel focuses on the relationships between mothers and their daughters, and between husbands and wives.
I was struck in particular by Casual violence of some of these parents in the meeting out of punishments to children with slaps and punches.
The novel looks at the vulnerability of young girls around the time of puberty and I was struck by the fact that it opened on the day of a young girls first period. The blood in the title of the novel that will be literally as well as talking about blood ties in families.
The characters are striking a real and complex in their development. The author has a beautiful writing style
which made the novel a delight to read. She really does have the ability to paint a picture with words and poetic sensitivity
This is a beautifully crafted book, written by someone who knows exactly how to make a perfect novel I had not come across across this author before that she has been quite prolific with her writing, and I will be searching her out in future.
I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK book is published in the UK on the 21st of August 2023 by HarperCollins, UK , Harper fiction
This review will appear on NetGalley, UK, good reads, and my book blog bionicsarahsbooks.wordpress.com

Perhaps the best book I've read this year. Incredibly powerful, and totally unflinching in its message and its detail, One Blood is surely destined for greatness.

One Blood, the latest novel from Denene Millner, is a sweeping saga which tells the story of three Black American mothers and their struggle to find love, happiness, security and fulfilment. From Jim Crow-era rural Virginia to early-21st century New York, Millner weaves a brutal, tender, devastating narrative which forces the reader to confront the legacy of racism in America and to question prevailing ideas around gender roles and parenthood.

The first part of the novel follows Grace, who is wrenched from a small town in the South to live with her social-climbing, domineering Aunt Hattie in Brooklyn. For Hattie, Grace is an unbearable reminder of a long-ago betrayal by Grace's mother, and she is unable to show even a glimmer of kindness to her displaced niece, using her as an indentured servant to earn her keep and eventually forcing her to give up her newborn daughter because of the shame Grace has brought to Hattie's door with a pregnancy out of wedlock.

Grace's story highlights that, far from being a homogenous group, united against their white oppressors, Black Americans had prejudices and divisions within their own communities too. While the truce between Black and white residents in Grace's hometown of Rose is palpably tenuous, the racism still overt and inevitable, her arrival in New York exposes her to a new kind of prejudice. Hattie sees herself as superior to the kin she left behind in Virginia 'where time stood still and people who chose to stay there had made their peace with it' because she chose not to accept her situation. Where in Rose, Black people were - to a one - poor and struggling for survival, Millner paints a picture of an affluent, thriving Black middle class, where children are expected to attend college and build careers as doctors and lawyers. Even within this group there is division - the most well-regarded are those families who are not descended from slaves, as if this were something earned rather than a mere accident of birth.

The second part of the book focuses on Delores (Lolo), the woman who adopts Grace's baby, Rae, after realising that she is unable to bear her own children. Her own mother having died when she was very young, Lolo came up hard, enduring all manner of abuse from those who were expected to care for her and having caring responsibilities for others forced upon her when she was still a child herself. All she wants is stability, which, in the mid 1960s for a woman, meant a husband. In an era of entrenched gender roles, society tells her she has nothing to offer if she can't be a mother. However, her eventual experience of motherhood recalls the trauma of being orphaned and forced to care for her baby brother, whom she blamed for their predicament, and thus she finds it difficult to show love and affection towards Rae and her brother, TJ. While motherhood is often rhapsodised about, One Blood does not shy away from depicting how becoming a mother doesn't mean you'll instinctively love your child or be able to meet all of their needs, and how being a mother can be incredibly difficult in myriad ways.

A running theme of Lolo's story is the responsibility of being mother to a daughter 'in a world that meant little girls nothing but hurt and harm', something which Lolo's formative experiences drove home to her. She is terrified of how the world might treat Rae but totally unable to articulate her worries or explain the experiences that spawned them, which drives a wedge between her and her daughter.

Lolo's story highlights the gulf between what society told women to want and what they actually wanted, as well as the taboo around discussing topics such as mental health in the Black community. As her children get older and she has more time to herself, Lolo doesn't have the words to express what she feels her life lacks or to confide in her loved ones about everything she has suffered - the way that Lolo bears the shame for her abuse (as Grace did for her pregnancy) exemplifies the way the sexualisation of Black women's bodies is so harmful. In trying to protect Rae, she also passes on the idea that her Black body is something to be ashamed of and hidden - another example of women, especially Black women, being made to bear responsibility for men's behaviour.

'Family is family, blood don't matter,' is a phrase uttered by one character on the subject of adoption, and it is an idea which is explored throughout the text, with several characters expressing conflicting viewpoints. Delores struggles to reconcile the fact that the father who left her and her brother when their mother died went on to be a loving protector for his other daughter, while her brother maintains that being bound by blood should supplant any negative feelings towards family one might harbour. This motif of what constitutes family is repeated throughout the novel.

In the final part of the book, we follow Rae, now an adult with a daughter of her own, as she tries to navigate a demanding full-time job with caring for her child, and still being the homemaker that her mother was and that her husband expects her to be. This was a fascinating study of how the reality of motherhood has shifted over the course of generations, while the gender dynamics have not always kept pace. Rae's story is a relatable tale of the struggles inherent in 'having it all', and the discussion around what makes a 'good' husband or wife, which runs throughout the book, coalesces concisely here.

Just as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad made it horrifyingly clear that escaping slavery did not necessarily assure a life of freedom and happiness for the runaways, One Blood deftly portrays the insidious racism that persisted in spite of the Civil Rights Act nominally outlawing racial discrimination: the 'white flight' from the suburbs when Black families started to move in; Black students being underestimated in school and their academic and career opportunities unfairly restricted; being overlooked in the workplace, and the persistent inequity in maternity care for Black mothers. One of the most interesting themes of the book is the shifting struggles of each generation of Black people, and how each generation's unique experiences can make it hard for them to understand each other and sympathise with each other's difficulties.

I was disappointed that several of the characters' arcs were left unfinished, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions as to their fates. However, this creates a symmetry with the author's own experience of being adopted, which forms the basis for Rae's origins in the book - not only did she have no idea what led her birth mother to abandon her, but she also never found out what became of her afterwards.

To be reductive, One Blood is a story about how secrets and lies, even those with the best of intentions, can tear a family apart, but it is so much more than that: a celebration of Black identity and pride; a rumination on the toxicity of gender roles and the inextricably linked roles of wife and mother; the importance of religion in the Black community, and what it means to be a good mother.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.