Excerpts-

• From the cover Shattered
  
  2000
  
  Later, the retired couple would tell the police they had run over to the Freeman place after hearing the shots. Their exact words would be shots rang out. But that was just a phrase that people of their generation had picked up from watching television. On the TV news, people were always saying shots rang out. In the old detective shows, shots were always ringing out. At the box office, Rambo and the Terminator and Serpico and Shaft had all made buckets of money by making shots ring out. But this was real life, in a town with one of the lowest crime rates in the nation. Few people around here had a vocabulary suited to a situation like this one.
  
  The space between houses being what it was in these parts, it was unlikely that anyone else living along Windward Road would have heard the shots, which did not, in fact, ring out so much as make a dull crack-crack sound. It was unlikely they would have heard the splitting open of the antique jar when it tumbled from the table in the study. Nor could they have heard the thud of the victim’s flank against the floor when he fell. What the neighbors heard for certain was the screech of the van’s tires as the panicked robbers tore out of the driveway and took the first road north away from the shore, in the direction of the country club.
  
  The neighbors had been collecting seeds from their coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. It was that time of year. They had been working side by side, knees in the dirt, murmuring to each other as they did. Taking in the clicks and chirps of their backyard. The whisper of the sea breeze through the tulip tree. The scent of fallen apples warming in the sun. But now they were hurrying past the line of trees that separated their garden from the Freemans’, their shoes flattening dirt clods and snapping fallen twigs as they went. They were surprised to see the children’s bicycles were still there.
  
  Later, they would recall that this was the moment when panic set in.
  
  Weren’t the kids supposed to be gone? The Freeman children were almost always gone during the week, now that school had started up. They would head back out on their bikes after classes, if they came home at all. Piano lessons for her, tennis or debate club for him. The neighbors banged on the side door, now. They called out. They ran around to the front and found the entrance to the main hallway wide open. And that’s when they heard it. A sound that would stay with them for years. The voice of a child, bleating like a lamb that had lost its way. A child they had watched grow from infancy. A girl who had played with their own granddaughter for most of her ten years.
  
  It was a sound that could shatter a person’s heart.
  
  At Least, This
  
  2018
  
  Well, of course they had hoped for a day like today. If life had taught them anything, it was that a person’s path still could be lit by moments of joy, even after unspeakable loss. And here they were. Soh and Ed Freeman smiled at each other then looked up at the window, where they could just make out the crown of flowers on their daughter’s head. Peaches and pinks. They glimpsed the dark tone of her arms against her cream-colored dress. No bridal veil, Ebby had insisted. Just the flowers and her granny’s gown, the bodice above the flounced skirt adjusted to fit. What a lovely young woman their child had become.
  
  There was a glint of light from their daughter’s engagement ring as she moved away from the window. Sapphires flanking a two-carat diamond, handed down to her by her other grandma, Soh’s mother. There was no personal...

Reviews-

• 

  November 25, 2024
  In Wilkerson’s incohesive sophomore novel (after Black Cake), the daughter of a prominent Black New England family contends with heartbreak and trauma. Having recently been left at the altar by her white fiancé, Henry, Ebby is unwillingly back in the spotlight. When she was 10, her name was in the papers after she’d witnessed an armed robber kill her 15-year-old brother, Baz, in their home. Nine months after the breakup, Ebby accepts an offer to manage her friend’s rental house in rural France, where she plans to write down the history of a clay pot made by an enslaved craftsman that had been passed down by the Freemans for 150 years, until it was broken the night of Baz’s death. Her plans are disrupted, however, when Henry and his new girlfriend turn out to be the house’s first guests. The novel poses intriguing questions about the nature of legacy and race relations, and though Wilkerson attempts to connect the plot’s various strands through the story of the jar, revealing, for instance, that Henry might know something about the night it was broken, the pieces don’t quite come together. Readers will be disappointed. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Literary.

• Golden Voice narrator January LaVoy brings empathy and believable characterizations to this multigenerational saga by the author of the bestselling novel BLACK CAKE. Years ago, Ebby Freeman's brother was killed and a family heirloom shattered in a still unsolved crime. In the present, Ebby, who's from an affluent Black family, has been jilted by her white fiancŽ. After bolting to Europe, she must piece together all that is broken to solve the long-ago crime and put her life back together. Always warm and sympathetic, LaVoy adjusts her pace and tone to signal shifts as the story moves between the pre-Civil War South and the current day. Coupled with realistic portrayals of everyone from children and teens to old men, the result is an engrossing audio experience. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

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