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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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POMEGRANATE

Helen Elaine Lee

For readers of Bernardine Evaristo, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jesmyn Ward, this is a gripping, reflective, and powerful novel of healing, redemption, and love that follows a Queer Black woman - a recovering opioid addict recently out of prison - who is desperate to stay clean and pull her tattered life together with the aim of regaining custody of her two children while her old life beckons.
Ranita Atwater is a young woman who's old before her time. Newly released from four years in prison, she's back in Boston, sober and determined to stay clean, desperate to see her two kids and try to make up for her absence from their lives. As she tries to pull her life together with the aim of gaining custody of her son and daughter, she faces a daunting task - proving to the people who hold the keys to her future, to the two aunts who stepped up to raise the children, and to herself, most of all, that she is not the same woman who sacrificed everything to a ravenous opioid addiction.

Bolstered by memories of Maxine, the woman she fell in love with in prison and who taught her to value herself and have faith that a better life exists, Ranita gets a job, finds an apartment, and begins to rebuild her relationship with her kids. But the streets and her old acquaintances beckon. Will she be strong enough to resist their pull?

Helen Lee is the Director of the Program in Women's & Gender Studies and Professor of Fiction Writing in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. Her first novel, The Serpent's Gift (1994), was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked (1999), was published by Scribner. She was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Formerly the Associate Chair of the Board of Directors of PEN New England, she served on its Freedom to Write Committee and taught in its Prison Creative Writing Program, which she helped establish.
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Published 2023-04-11

Comments

Pomegranate is a fierce and extraordinarily moving epic about coming home. Helen Lee has blessed us with the great American novel about people America tosses away. Her searing words lift up the lives of women - daughters, mothers, and lovers - you think you know but you have no idea. The achievement of a lifetime from a brilliant storyteller, this soulful novel is a balm, a truth telling, and a damn good read. Somewhere Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde are slurping fat, juicy pomegranates and rejoicing.

Lee's handling of trauma is deft, and her portrayal of the carceral system's cruelty is unflinching and empathetic... a cache of jewels.

Pomegranate feels like something new: a humane, closely observed account of a Black woman - a recovering addict, a mother who's lost custody of her children - emerging from prison, working to stay clean, reconnect with her family, and come to terms with her complicated past. This moving and panoramic novel starts off as a character study and evolves into a bighearted story of redemption.

Helen Elaine Lee is working at the height of her powers. With empathy, insight, and hope, Pomegranate reveals the hidden heartbreak of the women touched by incarceration. Prepare to be challenged and changed.

Helen Elaine Lee is a writer of great humanity, wisdom, delicacy and heart. Pomegranate is a moving portrait of a woman living with her mistakes and determined to do better. Ranita's journey out of addiction and incarceration and early trauma, her daily struggle to live a life as large as her spirit, is a remarkable feat of literary conjuration. This is what novels are for.

Both lush and probing, this book is evidence, yet again, of Lee's stunning gift to hold history and beauty in her hands simultaneously.

Lee has created a powerful, beautifully written story of a woman who painfully confronts her past to build her future.

...powerful story... With a light, poetic touch, Lee balances the painful details of Ranita's reality with genuine, persistent hope for new beginnings. It's irresistible.

Helen Elaine Lee has brought such a deep and beautiful world of people to the page, I found myself already missing them even as I continued to read. In their survival, we find ours and are left grateful, different, better.