Her
(second edition)
By Cherry Muhanji

Winner of the Ferris Grumley Award and the Lambda
Literary Award for New Fiction


Midwest Book Review
    Her is the story of Black men and women who came north
    in the 50s and 60s to Detroit for jobs and opportunities
    denied them in the south. It's a story about John R.
    Street, the Harlem of Detroit, where these men and
    women spent their nights trying to forget their days on the
    assembly lines of Motor City. Her is a rowdy, irreverent
    novel exploring a myriad of relationships between Black
    omen (mother and daughter, mother and daughter-in-law,
    lesbians, Black and "hi-yellah") that together depict the
    struggle of Black women: how they hold each other up
    and sometimes let each other down. And how their very
    lives teach each other survival. Her is a technically
    flawless, robust novel written with passion and a keen
    observation of the human condition by an author of both
    talent and insight. The characters are as memorable as
    their stories -- and their stories are timeless. -

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by
Erica Bauermeister
    "Houses collect things: old newspapers, junk mail - Her.
    She had come under cover of night, a stowaway with
    Brother's child tucked in the bottom of her belly. He had
    stuck his Alabama dirt farmer finger in her Dee-troit
    urban-ghetto Ford Motor Company hi-yellah hole and she
    had went from somewhere to nowhere, somehow." From
    the opening sentence, Her is a novel whose words refuse
    to be constrained by the boundaries of its pages. Like
    jazz that reaches out to both heart and gut, it is deep,
    throaty and rich; its language and characters wail, leap,
    glide and moan as Cherry Muhanji describes Detroit in
    the late 1950s and in particular a place called John R.
    Street. During the day John R. is filled with black women
    on their way to clean white women's houses and black
    men going to the factory where "The metal would roll out
    as they 'picked' their way through the field of Henry
    Ford's new invention - the assembly line." At night, the
    neon lights come on and John R. is "the strip" - full of
    nightclubs, pimps, hookers, female impersonators, and
    cruising johns. Whether day or night, John R. Street and
    its inhabitants are painfully, angrily, vibrantly alive,
    fighting a world that prefers light skin over dark,
    heterosexuality over homosexuality, money over spirit.
    From a central core of strong women characters, Cherry
    Muhanji experiments and elaborates, playing variations,
    solos, and combinations up and down the register. Her
    creation is both eye-opening and sensual.
Her is available from the following distributors.




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