TLC Book Tour: Promise

Several years ago now a nearby town experience an F5 tornado that absolustely devastated the community.  The power of Mother Nature is truly amazing.  

Promise by Minrose Gwin explores an F5 tornado that hit Tupelo, Mississippi in April of 1936.  Gwin's work is fiction, but she explores what the devastation must have been like, especially since the white and black communities were separate from each other and the black community was not given as much care or help as the white community.

The story begins just prior to the storm's coming, and Gwin explores this event by telling it through the eyes of two families- one black and one white.  Interestingly enough, these families are connected to each other through an infant, Promise, whose mother, Dreama, was raped by the wealthy white family's oldest son. 

Dreama has been raised by her grandparents and has dreams for her future.  The arrival of Promise is unexpected and unwelcome, yet she finds herself loving this baby.

Jo is the teenage girl in the white family whose voice we hear.  It is her brother, who she admits is evil, that is the father of Dreama's baby.  When the storm hits their house Jo watches her brother die, her mother get seriously injured, her baby brother disappear, and her father also leave to find help.  Jo herself has a serious head injury that she needs to receive medical attention for (I admit visualizing this kind of grossed me out).

Gwin takes her time developing the story of the storm.  Mere hours pass in each chapter.  From time to time I wanted things to move more quickly.  However, the payoff is in the second half of the book.  As the town tries to recover from the storm, the devastation seems almost too immense.  Dreama cannot find her baby and her search for Promise is the focus of the story.  I felt myself becoming entirely sucked in - knowing where he was the entire time- and wondering how this would be resolved.  I was not disappointed.

I loved learning about a little known event in history that certainly impacted Tupelo for a long time.  I loved that Gwin included photographs of the storm's devastastion at the book's end.  

This would make a great book club selection and readers who enjoy historical fiction - or just a good story in general, will want to pick this one up.



Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing a copy of this book for my review.  All opinions expressed are, as always, my own.

For more information visit the HarperCollins website.