On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. Nevertheless, Sexton brings undeniable power to her depiction of dreams fragmented and deferred. The historical milieu is less sharply drawn, with celebrity cameos too often standing in for concrete details of time and place. In alternating viewpoints, Sexton depicts the nuances of familial relationships, including the sisters’ combination of loyalty and jealousy, as well as the complex and changeable nature of regret.

Meanwhile, white developers begin disrupting Vivian’s Black Fillmore neighbors- many of whom, like Vivian, fled racial violence in the deep South-with eminent domain proceedings. Just as Vivian’s dream seems within reach, though, her daughters yearn for independence, with Chloe eyeing a solo career and Esther wanting to join the civil rights movement. Now in their early 20s, the sisters’ talents have been relentlessly forged during countless rooftop rehearsals run by their mother, Vivian, a widow whose hopes for her daughters all center on their musical superstardom. A deeply felt, big-hearted exploration of family, sisterhood, and gentrification, this is the kind of expansive, lush novel that envelops with charm while provoking with its fierce intelligence. On Fridays, they cheer the Salvations, hometown favorites made up of sisters Ruth, Esther, and Chloe Jones. On the Rooftop pdffurther cements Margaret Wilkerson Sexton as a deft chronicler of Blackness in America. It’s 1953, and people from all walks of life pack the Champagne Supper Club to see the latest jazz and R&B performers. Sexton ( The Revisioners) broadly reimagines The Fiddler on the Roof in an affecting family story set in a rapidly changing historically Black San Francisco neighborhood.

On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton