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Nefertiti Austin, author of Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America

When Nefertiti Austin, a single African American woman, decided she wanted to adopt a Black baby boy out of the foster-care system, she was unprepared for the fact that there is no place for Black women in the “mommy wars.” Austin set off on her path without the ability to seek guidance from others who looked like her or shared her experience. She soon realized that she would have to navigate skepticism not only from the adoption community, who deal almost exclusively with white women, but surprisingly, from her own family and friends as well. MOTHERHOOD SO WHITE is the story of Nefertiti’s fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now.

Week of June 3, 2024

Paperback releases for the week of June 3rd include CROOK MANIFESTO, a powerful and hugely entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory and continues Colson Whitehead's Harlem saga that began with HARLEM SHUFFLE; FLAGS ON THE BAYOU, James Lee Burke's Edgar Award-winning novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana as the South transforms, and a brilliant cast of characters are caught in the maelstrom; GOOD NIGHT, IRENE by Luis Alberto Urrea, an exhilarating World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary young woman’s heroic frontline service in the Red Cross; THE FIRST LADIES, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray's enlightening novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune; and MOTHERHOOD SO WHITE, an honest, vulnerable and uplifting memoir in which Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman.