By the Light of My Father's Smile: A Novel

By Alice Walker

A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico--Susannah, the writer-to-be; her sister, Magdalena; and their father and mother. There, amid an endangered band of mixed-race blacks and Indians called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they could ever dream.

Moving back and forth in time, and among unforgettable characters and their magical stories, Walker brilliantly explores the ways in which a woman's denied sexuality leads to the loss of the much prized and necessary original self--and how she regains that self, even as her family's past of lies and love is transformed. . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307816955

Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, five children’s books, and several volumes of essays and poetry. She has received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award, and has been honored with the O. Henry Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and received the Lennon Ono Peace Award. Her work has been published in forty languages worldwide.

Reviews for By the Light of My Father's Smile

[karima29 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book honours and sincerely explores the link between spirituality and sexuality by telling the tale of a family, and all it’s members, after an event that altered their lives forever. Without giving too much away, it’s about the denial of a young girl’s sexuality, and ultimately her self and how that affects her, her father, mother and sister. It also has a huge impact on how they all relate to each other from that point onwards.What was fascinating to me was that when early on in the book she reveals the event, I couldn't believe that that was it. Simply because this thing happens in homes all over South Africa every single day. It took me a while to realize that it’s not only normal in South Africa, but ALL over the world. Show me a society that celebrates a woman’s sexuality and healthy expression of it and I’ll move there tomorrow to raise my own family of healthy women. What followed the event was a very insightful and ever-so-interesting portrayal of what happens to us, ALL OF US, when we deny our daughters their sexuality. It’s painful. More painful yet when we have to acknowledge that we do not do the same thing with our sons.I find that with every Alice Walker novel that I have read so far I am surprised by how indoctrinated I am by living in a patriarchal society. There are things that happen in the world, ways of being, that we all act out each and every day that are just so commonplace that we never ever question them. We don’t conceive that it could be different, because we’ve never heard of it being a different way. When I read her books, not only does she show me different ways of thinking about things, or doing things, but she also gets me questioning why we do it the current way, and then gives me the answer to the best of her knowledge and experience. Her books teach me enough to want to know more and more and more.