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    On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick
    On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick
    On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick
    Ebook348 pages6 hours

    On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick

    By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A Reese’s Book Club Pick

    “An utterly original and brilliant story.” –Reese Witherspoon

    A stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives—set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco

    At home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore.

    Now Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, who promises to catapult The Salvations into the national spotlight. Vivian knows this is the big break she’s been praying for. But sometime between the hours of rehearsal on their rooftop and the weekly gigs at the Champagne Supper Club, the girls have become women, women with dreams that their mother cannot imagine.

    The neighborhood is changing, too: all around the Fillmore, white men in suits are approaching Black property owners with offers. One sister finds herself called to fight back, one falls into the comfort of an old relationship, another yearns to make her own voice heard. And Vivian, who has always maintained control, will have to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter: the community, The Salvations, and even her family.

    Warm, gripping, and wise, with echoes of Fiddler on the Roof, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s latest novel is a moving family portrait from “a writer of uncommon nerve and talent” (New York Times Book Review).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 6, 2022
    ISBN9780063139985
    On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick
    Author

    Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

    MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland with her family.

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    Reviews for On the Rooftop

    3.5/5

    27 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Set in the 1950s in San Francisco, widow Vivian has great plans for her three singing daughters. They initially form a jazz group called The Salvations. The daughters, however, have other ideas. This book explores gentrification, ambition, grief, love, and miscommunications. Sexton excels at portraying the way different generational viewpoints. This is set during a time of great difficulties for black families. The main source of conflict is the removal of families from their homes to enable new construction. The (real) club The Fillmore plays a key role in the plot. The writing is solid, characters are well developed. It is not an action-based story but kept my attention from beginning to end.
    • 5/5
      This is a heartwarming novel of the Black Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco as it once was before it was ripped apart by white developers in the 1950s. The author credits Fiddler on the Roof, with its three sisters and strong mom, as source inspiration, but I also saw the Oakland-bred Pointer Sisters in it. Mom, the widowed Vivian, has imparted her burning ambition to daughters Ruth, Esther, and Chloe, and she demands that they practice their harmonies every night on their rooftop. They're the pride of the close-knit block, but each girl has her own dreams to fulfill and they need to rise above their stumbles along the way. Vivian herself is staving off her strong attraction to Preacher, a widower who has been patiently waiting for her to accomplish her mission of getting the girls a contract to sing in LA nightclubs. There’s a wealth of minor characters to add charm to the story, which could almost be a companion, from the female gaze, to Walter Mosely’s Easy Rawlins LA novels, which begin in the same era. What an accomplished, evocative, and memorable period story.

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    On the Rooftop - Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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