Tempest Rising: A Novel. This item is unavailable.Tempest Rising: A Novel

Class, race, and sexuality converge in this page-turning story of desire, jealousy, and survival.

Set in west Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the upper-black-class. But their lives quickly unravel as their father's lucrative catering business collapses. When their father disappears suddenly, he is presumed dead, sending their mother spiraling into an apparent breakdown. The girls are wrenched from their mother and dumped into foster care in a working-class neighborhood in the home of Mae, a politically connected card shark. 

Though Mae lavishes affection onto her foster children, she is abusive to her own child, Ramona, a twenty-something stunning beauty. As Ramona struggles with Mae's abuse and her own hatred for the foster children, she also tries to keep at bay a powerful attraction she has for her boyfriend's father.

In Tempest Rising, McKinney-Whetstone richly evokes the early 1960s in west Philadelphia in this story of loss and healing, redemption, and love.

It is 1965 in Philadelphia. Clarise, Finch, and their three adolescent daughters are living the dream life of the black financially privileged. Then everything changes with the suddenness of a violent summer thunderstorm. Finch's lucrative catering business falls on hard times. Finch is lost at sea, Clarise suffers an apparent nervous collapse, and the girls -- Shern, Bliss, and Victoria -- are discharged into the foster care of politically connected cardsharp Mae and her beautiful, dark-spirited daughter Ramona. A world rich in love, pride, and joy has been abruptly exchanged for another -- one coarser and meaner, suffused with an air of jealousy, malignity, and brutal secrets that permeate every room of Mae's unhappy home. But pain and cruelty cannot destroy a determination to survive -- and a driving need to recapture a wounded lost thing called family.