A Good Neighborhood: A Novel

Name: A Good Neighborhood: A Novel
Author: Therese Anne Fowler
ISBN: 9781250237279

by Therese Anne Fowler

“Therese Anne Fowler has taken the ingredients of racism, justice, and conservative religion and has concocted a feast of a read: compelling, heartbreaking, and inevitable. I finished A Good Neighborhood in a single sitting. Yes, it’s that good.” —Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and A Spark of Light A provocative contemporary novel that examines the American dream through the lens of two families living side by side in an idyllic neighborhood, and the one summer that changes their lives irrevocably, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z and A Well-Behaved Woman. In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son.…

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"Therese Anne Fowler’s latest novel takes place in Oak Knoll, an imaginary, mildly integrated community in North Carolina. Fowler’s protagonist is Valerie Alston-Holt, a widowed Black university professor, a botanist with a brilliant biracial son, Xavier. Their lives are turned upside down when the Whitmans, a new white family, build a McMansion next door to the Alston-Holts’ modest home, upsetting the ecological balance of Valerie’s carefully maintained land, and killing an ancient, much-beloved tree. The families clash and the result is Shakespearian. An unseen narrator, a neighbor, serves as the Greek Chorus to this story of race, class, region and, yes, tragic love. I hope HBO or Netflix or somebody is paying attention."

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