The American Daughters

In 1860s New Orleans, Ady is a curious, sharp-witted girl enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter alongside her fierce mother, Sanite, who fills her with stories of freedom and resistance. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady wanders into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman who draws her into the Daughters, a secret society of enslaved and free women of color working to undermine the Confederacy. As the Civil War closes in on the city, the Daughters steal, spy, and sabotage, and Ady must decide how much she will risk for the future she has never been allowed to imagine. Framed as a recovered history, the novel gives voice to the women written out of the record.