Daughter: A Novel

Daughter a penetrating novel by Essence editor asha bandele and chosen by Black Issues Book Review as Best Urban Fiction for 2003 follows a young woman through life that changes in one night from a horrific incident with police brutality.. At nineteen Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother Miriam. One winter night Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughters hospital bed Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents her affair with Ayas father and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past—her losses and regrets—she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness. Moving between past and present the novel builds to a dramatic heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive conclusion. Daughter is a novel that appears to be about police brutality but police brutality is only the landscape. The heart of the story is about the silence between generations--the secrets mothers keep from their children in an effort to protect them.