Perkins-Valdez was awarded the First Novelist Award by the American Library Association Black Caucus for Wench, widely praised for its brave and moving depiction of the painful realities of the lives of black slave women. In her second work of fiction, Perkins-Valdez moves to the post-war years, following three former slaves from the South to Chicago. Uniquely gifted—one is a healer, born with magic hands, one can commune with the dead, and one is on a quest for his lost family—the trio struggles to establish new lives, just as the nation itself works to leave behind its recent turmoil.
