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You Were Always Mine: A Novel - Softcover

Pride, Christine

 
9781668005521: You Were Always Mine: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668005522 ISBN 13: 9781668005521
Verlag: Atria, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The acclaimed authors of the “emotional literary roller coaster” (The Washington Post) and Good Morning America book club pick We Are Not Like Them return with this moving and provocative novel about a Black woman who finds an abandoned white baby, sending her on a collision course with her past, her family, and a birth mother who doesn’t want to be found.

Cinnamon Haynes has fought hard for a life she never thought was possible—a good man by her side, a steady job as a career counselor at a local community college, and a cozy house in a quaint little beach town. It may not look like much, but it’s more than she ever dreamed of or what her difficult childhood promised. Her life’s mantra is to be good, quiet, grateful. Until something shifts and Cinnamon is suddenly haunted by a terrifying question: “Is this all there is?”

Daisy Dunlap has had her own share of problems in her nineteen years on earth—she also has her own big dreams for a life that’s barely begun. Her hopes for her future are threatened when she gets unexpectedly pregnant. Desperate, broke, and alone, she hides this development from everyone close to her and then makes a drastic decision with devastating consequences.

Daisy isn’t the only one with something to hide. When Cinnamon finds an abandoned baby in a park and takes the blonde-haired, blue-eyed newborn into her home, the ripple effects of this decision risk exposing the truth about Cinnamon’s own past, which she’s gone to great pains to portray as idyllic to everyone…even herself.

As Cinnamon struggles to contain old demons, navigate the fault lines that erupt in her marriage, and deal with the shocking judgments from friends and strangers alike about why a woman like her has a baby like this, her one goal is to do right by the child she grows more attached to with each passing day. It’s the exact same conviction that drives Daisy as she tries to outrun her heartache and reckon with her choices.

These two women, unlikely friends and kindred spirits must face down their secrets and trauma and unite for the sake of the baby they both love in their own unique way when Daisy’s grandparents, who would rather die than see one of their own raised by a Black woman, threaten to take custody.

Once again, these authors bring their “empathetic, riveting, and authentic” (Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author) storytelling to an unforgettable novel that revolves around provocative and timely questions about race, class, and motherhood. Is being a mother a right, an obligation, or a privilege? Who gets to be a mother? And to whom? And what are we willing to sacrifice for the sake of marriage, friendship, and our dreams?

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Christine Pride is a writer, editor, and longtime publishing veteran. She’s held editorial posts at many different trade imprints, including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon & Schuster. As an editor, Christine has published many bestselling and critically acclaimed novels and memoirs. In addition to writing novels, she does select editorial work, proposal/content development, and teaching and coaching.

Jo Piazza is a bestselling author, podcast creator, and award-winning journalist. She is the national and international bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction books including We Are Not Like Them, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, The Knockoff, and How to Be Married. Her work has been published in ten languages in twelve countries and four of her books have been optioned for film and television. A former editor, columnist, and travel writer with Yahoo, Current TV, and the Daily News (New York), her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York magazine, Glamour, Elle, Time, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Slate. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in economics and communication, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in religious studies from New York University. 

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Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
Cinnamon Haynes can’t remember when she stopped wanting things in life. When she was younger, she was filled with longing for silky straight hair that would slide around her shoulders, for bright-white Rollerblades with pink wheels, for her own room where she could paint her walls neon green or orange or whatever color she wanted and have one of those beds with a canopy over it and a slew of pictures in white frames made out of seashells. She would also have photos to put in those frames, pictures of her friends and family. She had none of that.

Perhaps her strongest longing was for her mother to come back from wherever she’d disappeared to when Cinnamon was barely out of diapers, leaving her with her sixty-two-year-old grandmother who passed away three years later. No, her strongest longing was actually for Grandma Thelma to return from the dead and save Cinnamon from everything that came after.

These yearnings used to be a roaring furnace deep within her, hot and constant and consuming. But at some point along the way the fire just burned itself out, slowly, little dying embers one by one, and what was left when the smoke cleared was acceptance: this was, and would always be, the life she got. It was almost liberating because with that resignation came the freedom of surrendering, come what may. It was pointless to pretend that she had any control over her circumstances, better to abandon herself to the current and let it carry her along while maintaining an almost detached curiosity about where she would eventually wash up, which turned out to be here: a pin dot of a town spitting distance from the Atlantic Ocean in a run-down but cozy cottage, listening to her husband snoring like a lawn mower in bed next to her.

Lucky and Cinnamon aren’t two words that rightfully belong in the same sentence, but some higher force had a hand somewhere along the way. Because if you’d told her twenty years ago that this future was waiting for her, she would have laughed out loud and asked what you must have been smoking to see this in the cards. The statistics promised a very different trajectory for a girl like her: she was supposed to be alone, homeless, dead, on drugs, or some combination of it all. But somehow—through a rare and brilliant twist of luck, or grace or fate—she’d found herself in this life and let herself settle into it like a warm bath. Granted, it’s not like her present circumstances are particularly opulent by any means—it’s a little gold band on her ring finger, a roof over her head, and a “real” job at the local community college, with a desk and benefits, where she gets to help kids and maybe make a difference in their lives. Wasn’t it something that that could feel like hitting the lottery?

This is why she’s constantly reminding herself to have the good sense to appreciate what she has and wish every day that it doesn’t get snatched away. Or more specifically, that no one discovers that she doesn’t deserve it after all. Good, quiet, grateful. That’s her mantra.

So why, then, is she being tormented by the same relentless dream night after night, the one that leaves her shaken and unsettled all day? Here she is now, blinking up at the ceiling, with a hammering heart and beads of sweat frizzing her edges before it’s even crossed the sun’s mind to make an appearance.

In the dream—nightmare, more accurately—she’s riding an elevator in some impossibly high skyscraper in a gleaming, fancy city she’s never been to. People get on and off as it climbs until Cinnamon finds herself all alone on the top floor. The doors refuse to open no matter what combination of buttons she jabs. Eventually the walls start to press in on her from all sides until the elevator shrinks to the size of a closet, then a coffin. It’s a good day when she wakes up before the ceiling starts pressing down on top of her thick braids. Today is not one of those days.

She knows getting back to sleep at this point is about as likely as the Mega Millions ticket on her bedside table being a winner. So she slinks out of bed and pads down the hall to the tiny spare room at the back of the house. In the corner, behind a clutter of old junk they never cleared out when they inherited the place from Jayson’s grandmother, there’s a saggy corduroy beanbag chair nestled under the window. A teetering pile of books flanks either side. She affectionately thinks of this little clearing she’s carved out for herself as her reading nook—emphasis on nook. If there were a place that embodied Cinnamon’s lifelong quest to feel safe, it would be this one right here. Dark, tucked away, and all hers.

The book is just where she left it—hidden under the beanbag she settles into. Old habits die hard, and hiding things is one of them. She digs out the stained, dog-eared copy of Charlotte’s Web, one of two possessions she’s had since childhood. The other, Grandma Thelma’s leather-bound Bible, she keeps in her bedside drawer like they do in hotels.

Reading is supposed to calm her. Books have always been her truest salvation and most constant companion. For some people it’s drugs or booze. Cinnamon has always steered clear of those, maybe out of an innate sense of self-preservation—losing herself to them would have been too easy. As far as addictions go, reading was at least one that couldn’t destroy her. And she’d bet good money it was as effective at soothing her as any of the drugs she’d never tried would be. Cheaper too. For as long as she had a book open in her lap, she had a portal to escape everything going on around her and in her mind. And so reading became her respite from the very first moment she made the wild discovery that she could string letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into ideas. Since then she’s had to have a book within easy reach, like a life jacket or fire extinguisher. Every time she settles down in this beanbag chair she might as well be ten years old, tucked away in the corner of the Wooten Hills Regional Library, which is where she’d stolen the book in her hands from. After reading it through eight times crouched in the back of the stacks, she didn’t see how she had much of a choice. She simply couldn’t live without it, without knowing she could devour Charlotte’s Web at least a hundred more times, its pages warping with age. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to buy her a brand-new meticulously wrapped copy for her birthday. Any guilt that she’d felt slipping it into her bag was offset when Sarah the librarian smiled at her on the way out. Cinnamon swore Sarah could see the book burning a hole in her bag and knew her secret. So when Sarah nodded and let her go, she figured the librarian—her favorite—understood. There were so few mercies in Cinnamon’s young life—she couldn’t be shy about grabbing on to one or two.

The problem is, reading is bringing her zero comfort this morning. The words just dance around the page like waving hands, whispering, Girl, wait—is this all there is? What is she to make of this sudden restlessness that came on like an itch she’ll never be able to reach? This growing anxiety that even a book can’t quell.

Lucia has decided this is all just the birthday blues ahead of Cinnamon’s thirty-fifth...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668005522
ISBN 13 
9781668005521
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande