"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright...Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC's elite wealthy Black families, and his par­ents don't let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William's family and grant her the life she's been searching for"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

In 1950s Philadelphia and Washington, DC, the lives of 15-year-old Ruby Pearsall, whose taboo affair threatens her dreams of being the first in her family to attend college, and Eleanor Quarles, who hopes having a baby will gain her husband’s wealthy family’s acceptance, collide in the most unexpected of ways. - (Baker & Taylor)

“Amazing…I was completely surprised by the ending of this beautifully told and written book.” —Reese Witherspoon

“A triumph of historical fiction” (The Washington Post), an instant New York Times bestseller, and a Reese’s Book Club pick, set in 1950s Philadelphia and Washington, DC, that explores what it means to be a woman and a mother, and how much one is willing to sacrifice to achieve her greatest goal.

1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives. - (Simon and Schuster)

Sadeqa Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels. Her accolades include being the 2022 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy finalist, a BCALA Literary Honoree, and the Library of Virginia’s Literary People’s Choice Award winner. She is a Kimbilio Fellow and teaches in the MFA program at Drexel University. Originally from Philadelphia, she currently lives near Richmond, Virginia with her husband and three teens.

- (Simon and Schuster)

Booklist Reviews

In Philadelphia, 1948, 15-year-old Ruby is consumed with studying hard in hopes of winning a prestigious scholarship and becoming the first person in her family to attend college. When she meets Shimmy, a Jewish boy who is the son of her aunt's landlord, they begin a forbidden interracial relationship that threatens her dream. Meanwhile Eleanor is a university sophomore in Washington, D.C. when she meets William Pride, a respectable graduate student who comes from a world of wealth. As their relationship grows, their differences in class become more prominent, especially as William's mother voices her strong opposition to their liaison and attempts to control their relationship for the sake of propriety. As the two Black women navigate romance and ambition, these racial and familial differences threaten to derail their happiness. Author of Yellow Wife (2021) and winner of the USA Best Book Award for Love in a Carry-on Bag (2012), Johnson showcases the difficult boundaries of race, class, and education as she explores the obstacles and consequences that confront those who seek to cross them. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial—ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift—he sees shifting islands no one else can—who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women—15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian émigré studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II—like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal Reviews

Taking on another fascinating under-told piece of women's history in this well-researched new novel, the author of Yellow Wife illuminates the impact of unwed pregnancy through the alternating narratives of two young Black women in the 1950s. Supported by two loving, hardworking parents, Eleanor Quarles is studying at the pinnacle of Black higher education, Howard University, and she plans a career as an archivist. Ruby Pearsall, the daughter of an unwed teenage mother, is struggling to be the first in her family to go to college, via the We Rise program for high school students of color in Philadelphia. Eleanor and Ruby are both forced to make heartrendingly difficult choices, revealing startling truths about adoption, race, and class in the United States in the years before legalized birth control. Sparked by the author's own family history, this timely novel imagines the emotional turmoil of two young Black women of vastly different circumstances in the 1950s, as unwed pregnancy and the stigma surrounding it threaten to derail their carefully made plans for college and careers. VERDICT This is a moving work of women's fiction with timely perspective on racism, colorism, and pre-Roe women's rights in the United States of the 1950s. Fans of Tayari Jones, Brit Bennett, and Jeni McFarland will want to check it out.—Laurie Cavanaugh