Going Down South

Glover weaves the stories of three generations of African American women in a tale both familiar and surprising. In the early 1960s, 15-year-old Olivia Jean tells her parents she is pregnant, and her father, Turk, and mother, Daisy, decide to take Olivia to Daisy's mother's house in Cold Water Springs, Ala., to avoid a scandal in their Brooklyn neighborhood. The plan is for Daisy and Turk to return to Brooklyn and leave Olivia in the care of her grandmother, Birdie. But Birdie insists that Daisy remain as well. Daisy is deeply resentful of her mother, who ran a bootlegging operation in their dry county when Daisy was young, but she agrees to stay, and over the next few months, all three women learn about themselves. While the arc may seem familiar, Glover does an admirable job of avoiding cliche (as when Daisy and Birdie attempt to resolve their conflicts with a wrestling match) and provides readers with an absorbing setting and a complex family.