Promise
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Adenrele Ojo
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By:
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Minrose Gwin
About this listen
In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
A few minutes after 9 p.m. on Palm Sunday, April 5, 1936, a massive funnel cloud flashing a giant fireball and roaring like a runaway train careened into the thriving cotton-mill town of Tupelo, Mississippi, killing more than 200 people, not counting an unknown number of Black citizens, one-third of Tupelo's population, who were not included in the official casualty figures.
When the tornado hits, Dovey, a local laundress, is flung by the terrifying winds into a nearby lake. Bruised and nearly drowned, she makes her way across Tupelo to find her small family - her hardworking husband, Virgil, her clever 16-year-old granddaughter, Dreama, and Promise, Dreama's beautiful light-skinned three-month-old son.
Slowly navigating the broken streets of Tupelo, Dovey stops at the house of the despised McNabb family. Inside, she discovers that the tornado has spared no one, including Jo, the McNabbs' dutiful teenage daughter, who has suffered a terrible head wound. When Jo later discovers a baby in the wreckage, she is certain that she's found her baby brother, Tommy, and vows to protect him.
During the harrowing hours and days of the chaos that follows, Jo and Dovey will struggle to navigate a landscape of disaster and to battle both the demons and the history that link and haunt them. Drawing on historical events, Minrose Gwin beautifully imagines natural and human destruction in the deep South of the 1930s through the experiences of two remarkable women whose lives are indelibly connected by forces beyond their control. A story of loss, hope, despair, grit, courage, and race, Promise reminds us of the transformative power and promise that come from confronting our most troubled relations with one another.
©2018 Minrose Gwin (P)2018 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat, Jessica Almasy, Victor Bevine, and others
- Length: 32 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.
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Too Good For Audio
- By Yennta on 06-18-12
By: Eudora Welty
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Angel of Harlem
- By: Kuwanna Haulsey
- Narrated by: Brenda Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspired by the extraordinary events of Dr. May Chinn’s life, Angel of Harlem is a deeply affecting story of love and transcendence. Weaving seamlessly scenes from the battlefields of the Civil War, during which her father escaped from slavery, to the Harlem living rooms and kitchen tables where May is sometimes forced to operate on her patients, this fascinating novel lays bare the heart of a woman who changed the face of medicine.
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Really Enjoyed!
- By Amazon Customer on 08-08-19
By: Kuwanna Haulsey
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This Side of the Sky
- By: Elyse Singleton
- Narrated by: Myra Taylor, Sharon Washington, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
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A Breath of Fresh Air
- By Adina Andreu on 07-19-12
By: Elyse Singleton
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Long Lankin
- By: Lindsey Barraclough
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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When Cora and her little sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their great-aunt in the isolated village of Bryers Guerdon, they receive a less than warm welcome and are desperate to go back to London. But Auntie Ida’s life was devastated the last time two young girls were at Guerdon Hall, and now her nieces’ arrival has reawakened an evil that has lain in wait for years. A haunting voice in an empty room; a strange, scarred man lurking in the graveyard; mysterious words scrawled on the walls of the abandoned church ... all point to a horrifying truth that has held Bryers Guerdon in its grip for centuries.
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AMAZING!!!
- By Sharron on 09-06-14
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The Hollow Ground
- By: Natalie S. Harnett
- Narrated by: Luci Christian
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.
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Disfunction makes a good read
- By NHull on 05-30-14
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
- By: Tiffany Baker
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Truly Plaice, an overly large and ungainly girl, is the polar opposite of her sister, Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. With their parents dead, Truly and Serena Jane are separated: Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation.
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meh...
- By Victoria on 02-25-09
By: Tiffany Baker
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
What listeners say about Promise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Asheley
- 03-15-18
Compelling and character-driven.
I rated this a 4.5/5 on Goodreads.
Promise is excellent. It is compelling and character-driven. I had heard of this particular tornado in Tupelo, Mississippi but I wasn't aware of all of the details in its documentation - with the falsifying of the casualty reports (Because that's what it was, right? Failing to include an entire race of people on official records was essentially falsifying records.) and with the way the recovery and relief efforts were handled. The author clearly researched extensively for this book and the result is a story that captivated me and left me speechless for a while after it ended.
There are two POVs: Jo and Dovey. Jo is a young white female from a wealthier, more prominent family in Tupelo. Dovey is an older black female who is employed by Jo's family. Dovey has worked for Jo's family for many years and their families are connected in ways that have never been fully realized nor resolved. In the tornado's immediate aftermath, these two families become even more enmeshed and eventually their stories come full circle.
Be aware up front that this story is a little bit slow to start. In the first couple of chapters, I hit rewind a couple of times because my mind wandered. (Hence, the 4.5/5 on Goodreads) There is some set-up and backstory, and I couldn't help losing focus a little bit. It took me a couple of chapters to really feel like I had a grasp on Dovey and Jo - but by the time the tornado hits, I felt like I was getting to know them pretty well. A slow burn in this instance was a good thing, I think; I got the chance to get to know these women very well, which came in super-handy when they both were under a ton of stress and made some questionable decisions. I understood them better, or at least why they said/acted certain ways. I also felt very connected to them throughout the story, which was pretty important to me since they were from two totally different worlds.
Sometimes I shock myself with my own ability to be surprised by racist acts. Here, in some of the instances of actual rescue or aid workers providing medical treatment to people with severe injuries - well, I should not have been surprised given the setting and the time. I 100% appreciate that I was able to be transported to this time in history through this story, though. I cannot remember reading an account of a disaster and relief operation like this one during the early 1930's and I think that by participating in this audiobook listen, I learned some things.
The big plotline in the book involving the baby - whoa! I don't want to spoil anything here, but this is another place where the story involving these two families and their connections comes well into play, and it just pays off to have a firm grasp on these characters.
Southern historical fiction is absolutely my thing and this was a fantastic read. I enjoyed spending the time with Jo and Dovey, and I appreciate seeing the world at that time thru their eyes - especially Dovey, who tells her story with an honesty that touched me. Adenrele Ojo's narration added so much to her character; she just made Dovey more robust for the listening, There were times when I felt like Dovey was talking directly to me. Jo's parts were good too, but it was Dovey's POVs that stood out to me in terms of narration.
I recommend Promise for readers that enjoy a nice Southern-set slow-burn story with great character development. I spent one of my credits on this one and would listen to it again.
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- Taintedrose76
- 07-18-18
a look into the past
This story was a great find that had me learn about things I never knew about from the past.
as sad as the story is it was very detailed and gave me a look into the lives touched in this town and the struggles back then.
I never can understand how people were ok with the segregation of races back then or how they treated each other and never will because my heart can't feel that way about people. I am so glad at the end one baby brought them together and showed in times of hardship those stupid labels and seperations don't matter because we all bleed the same. we all suffer the same and we all struggle to survive the same.
I loved the narration and the cover as well.
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- JAMES
- 04-01-21
Very very good!
I’m not sure what our neighbors to the north were looking for, but this was not only very entertaining but also a good history of Mississippi during the late 30’s
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- Anjoli
- 06-15-19
Mostly Disappointing
I am usually drawn to historical fiction, but this story and delivery left much to be desired. Not only was this book the very definition of “slow burn,” but it also included so many superfluous details that did not help the story move forward. I can understand and empathize with how the characters experienced delirium and confusion following a catastrophic event like a tornado, but the addition of these details did nothing for plot and character development. Like other reviewers, I also had to rewind at times as my mind had wandered. The “plot twist” is predictable, but the narration is what did it in for me. The narrator had almost no difference in intonation between characters. It almost felt like a run-on sentence. If you’re looking for a historical fiction based on intertwined lives of a two women from different backgrounds, try ‘Whistling Past the Graveyard’ or ‘The Invention of Wings.’
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- B. Ventura
- 03-14-18
Great performance but......
Started out positively great, then lost it. Somewhere in the middle the author lost focus.
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