In Other People’s Children, three mothers make excruciating choices to protect their families and their dreams-choices that put them at decided odds against one another. But Carli’s mother, Marla, has other plans for her grandbaby. When she makes the gut-wrenching decision to give her baby up for adoption, she chooses the Durbins. When several adoptions fall through, Gail’s desire for a child overwhelms her.Ĭarli is a pregnant teenager from a blue-collar town nearby, with dreams of going to college and getting out of her mother’s home. Determined to expand their family, the Durbins turn to adoption. But then she miscarried-once, twice, three times. Gail and Jon Durbin moved to the Chicago suburbs to set up house as soon as Gail got pregnant. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.Ī riveting debut novel about a couple whose dream of adopting a baby is shattered when the teenage mother reclaims her child. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day.

She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. Simply enthralling.” -Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were YoursĬalled 'wholly engrossing' by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this harrowing story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.īorn on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life.

In Pheby, Sadeqa Johnson has created a woman whose struggle to survive and to protect the ones she loves will have readers turning the pages as fast as their fingers can fly. “A fully immersive, intricately crafted story inspired by the pages of history.

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