Solemn

Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half-sibling: the outcome of her father's mistakes with a married woman who lives in their trailer park. After Solemn witnesses a man throw the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed.

As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother's wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated baby's doomed mother disappears without a trace. Solemn remains trapped by connections to the missing other woman and an honest black cop who suspects more to the story than others on the small local police force can see. When her father's next mistake - a robbery - lands Solemn in a group home for troubled girls, she meets a Chicago delinquent who wants to escape. There, Solemn must face the truth of who she really is and what she is really made of.

Kalisha Buckhanon is the author of the novels Upstate and Conception, a winner of book awards from the American Library Association and Friends of American Writers, a recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the Mellon/Mays Foundation, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sisters in Crime, and an alumni of University of Chicago's English Department and the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program of The New School in New York City.