The Book Keeper

In a memoir thats equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her familys history. When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemos kitchen table, shea white womanhad been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her fathers secret career as a writer of slavery porn, she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.