Joy - Softcover

Hunt, Marsha

3.63

51 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452267536 ISBN 13: 9780452267534

Publisher: Penguin, 1991

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As the Bang family gathers for Joy Bang's funeral, Baby Palatine, the elderly woman who raised the Bang girls and who has an idealized image of the Bangs, realizes that their's is not a perfect family. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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From the Back Cover:

“All families got secrets, but Joy’s had more than their fair share. So while I’m able to tell you what she did, ain’t no use me pretending that I know why ... they was just born under bad moons.”

This is the story of Joy Bang and her sisters, three singers who dream of a glittering future that briefly, too briefly is theirs. When Joy dies unexpectedly, the floodgates of Baby Palatine’s memory are opened. Foster mother to the sisters from their childhood, she remembers the hopes and dreams which fuelled their meteoric rise. But as the family gathers for the funeral, Baby is forced to acknowledge that as well as the Joy she loved and worshipped, there was another Joy she had never known ...

A compelling story of jealousy and love, tragedy and deception, and of growing up black in a white world, this is Marsha Hunt’s powerful first novel.

“Marsha Hunt joins a formidable company of black American writers. Like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, she proclaims the experience of the black American woman in a white dominated world.”
OBSERVER

“Intricately constructed and skilfully written, 'Joy' is an assured mixture of tragedy and wry comedy which has something to say – about blackness, about love that binds, and about the way we become what we are.”
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About the Author:

Marsha Hunt was born in 1946 and grew up in Philadelphia. She studied at the University of California in Berkeley during the student riots of the 1960s but soon left for Europe.

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