Tuccelli's debut novel opens in 1941 as Amelia McGee sends her 11-year-old daughter, Ella, and their dog, Brando, on the bus from D.C. to her brother in Georgia, fearing for her daughter's life after receiving racial threats. Ella and Brando are mugged en route, then rescued by two ancient black women Willie Mae Cotton, a former slave, and her partner. Thus Tuccelli begins to unravel the mystery of Ella's origins. Her father is African American, her mother Cherokee, and each is a descendant of a white man born in Georgia in 1789. Moving back and forth in time, Tuccelli introduces intertwined characters, including Ella's grandmother, raised on a reservation; her father, Obidiah Bounds, descended from a mulatto landowner; and Willie Mae, a slave who marries the son of an overseer related to Samuel Bounds an ancestor of Ella's grandmother on the Cherokee side of this intricately linked family tree. Full of historical detail and tinged with mysticism Willie Mae practices voodoo and gives off a glow when visited by ghostly visions Tuccelli's novel brims with the love and fierce loyalty that bind these disparate generations together.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist

In Tuccelli's sweeping debut, mothers and daughters are fiercely tethered over six generations and beyond death. The novel, which spans the years 1836-1941, follows the female descendants of pioneer Solomon Bounds, whose family tree is crowded with slave owners and slaves, Native Americans, and the soldiers who drove them from their lands. After the home she shares with her mother, Mia, is vandalized on the eve of a civil rights protest in Washington, D.C., the youngest of Bounds's kin, great-great-great-great-granddaughter Ella McGee, 11, journeys to her uncle's home in Hopewell, Ga. On the way, she gets lost and lands in the care of Willie Mae, an elderly mystic and the wife of Bounds's grandnephew. Meanwhile, Mia frantically searches for her daughter in Hopewell and finds a county whose rural idyll has been ravaged by the treacheries of slaveholders and the KKK. In intersecting narratives, Willa Mae, Mia, and Ella recount brutal traumas that gave them access to a magical spirit world of female ancestors. This elaborately woven plot serves the story well, peppering the novel with moments of lingering beauty and shocking violence. Though Tuccelli dances close to stereotypes of maternal piety, the complexity of her ghosts and her protagonists' folksy charm help stave off sentimentality. Agent: ICM. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

It's a good thing there's a helpful genealogical chart at the beginning of this first novel, as the narrative ranges over seven generations of two Southern families and offers up a confusing web of marriages and sexual unions among black slaves, white masters, freed slaves, freeborn blacks, Native Americans, and their mixed-race progeny in the fictional Georgia county of Hopewell. For a work of historical fiction, there isn't much detail about the historical South, just enough to designate time periods for the novel's events. Tales of family lore, ghosts, and hoodoo magic are jumbled together with childhood recollections, hate crimes, civil rights activism, and acts of institutionalized racial prejudice, and this makes it hard to follow the stories of the family members from different generations that thread through the book. VERDICT This promising debut's many intriguing stories are scattered too freely, and the voices of the different characters aren't differentiated enough for readers to connect with them individually. However, those who enjoy stories about generations of wise mothers and beloved daughters should appreciate.--Laurie A. Cavanaugh, Wareham Free Lib., MA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.