#105: Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Our July book selection is Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.

We will meet at Promontory Point, near the Promontory Field House. Our meeting location is in the park by the lake, NOT the restaurant/music venue near 53rd Street. Please leave yourself enough time to find your way, and read the directions under "How to find us" carefully.

About the book: Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, due to a mysterious estrangement between her mother and grandmother, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing Happy Land on Bookshop (affiliate link).