By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. $25.00. Counterpoint.

This stunning novel is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of two African-American women connected by blood but divided by time: a biracial single mom in 2017 and a former sharecropper turned farm-owning widow in 1924. Both tell their progeny stories that ground the novel in the harsh facts of history even as they take on the weight of myth. The plot itself is not quite the point; this is a novel about the women, the mothers.