Overview

Family trauma, race, and the destiny of a nation corrupted by slavery, cast in the light of epic myth: 'More than a saga of Black revitalization...Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.' (The New York Times Book Review) The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim. Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher's granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America's original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin. By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.

Full Product Details

9781961341616

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Reviews

""I think it ironic that critics at large have been bemoaning the fact that American literature has produced no counterpart to James Joyce in vision and structure and that such a person has now appeared within the ranks of Afro-American literature. This is a book for the ages."" —Gloria Naylor “More than a saga of Black revitalization . . . Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.” —John Bierhorst, The New York Times Book Review ""Carolivia Herron has written a swirling and terrifying epic. It works out a vision of national damnation rising, as inevitably as the damnation of the House of Atreus, from America’s original sin of slavery.""  —Richard Dyer, Los Angeles Times ""Bold and brilliant, this lyrical first novel is a compelling modern epic, an allegory of civilization revealed in the pain and passions of an educated African American family."" —Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Carolivia Herron is an African American Jewish author, educator, and publisher living in Washington, DC. She is currently a Lecturer and Scholar Coach in English and Classics at Howard University and is an emerita Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Project Humanities at Arizona State University.

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