I'll Take You There

I'll Take You There is a deeply personal portrait of a young woman becoming a writer. As the novel opens, Anellia looks back on her first years in college at Syracuse University in the 1960s. She's haunted by her mother's early death, and by the guilt her brothers and father cast upon her. She is then swept away by an intense love affair with an extremely gifted Black philosophy student. In an era when interracial relationships were deemed unseemly in mainstream society, her torturous affair can only lead to Anellia's further alienation. Anellia's sense of rejection reaches a turning point in the final section, when her father unexpectedly reappears in her life, and she makes the journey from upstate New York to the Midwest to be with him in his final days. In her search for acceptance and truth, she discovers the power of her own survival.