When Hurricane Katrina rolls through Alice’s small town of Ocean Springs, MS she doesn’t anticipate that the rest of her life is going to go up in smoke with it. After her husband, a powerful local doctor, attacks her at knifepoint and nearly kills her (only to be saved by her persistent 3-year old son), she files for divorce and enters an epic, gothic, FEMA-trailer courtroom divorce and custody battle that lasts for almost ten years. Through court hearings and attempted kidnappings, love affairs, and heartbreak, Alice never loses sight of what matters – maintaining custody of her three children. It’s a battle that finally comes full circle when the same son who saved her endures a violent encounter at his father’s hands and Alice must return the favor to save her family, forge a new life with her blossoming children, and reclaim her true self.
When her husband strangled her, oxygen was cut off to her brain and she developed a seizure disorder, which then caused a seizure that made her fall and sustains a traumatic brain injury. When Alice first started writing this book, she couldn’t even speak in sentences yet. Writing this book quite literally brought her back to this beautiful, lyrical voice. Heartbreaking, chilling, and most importantly inspiring, Some Bright Morning is one of my very favorite titles on our list. It will bring you to tears, make you root for Alice and her children, and have you believing in the power of strength, hope, and personal truth.
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children acclaims, “I love this book with my entire body. Alice Anderson’s Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is nothing short of a body and soul retrieval […] I am astonished at how this fiercely beautiful song can arise from such wreckage of violence and lies. In page after riveting page, we’re reminded how mothers love their children with ferociousness, and how that love might take shape in the child who saves her life. Maybe, by refusing to surrender our bodies, we are always saving our own lives. Maybe our songs are worth fighting for. Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is that necessary song.”
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