No easy place to be

the long version

This spellbinding novel magnificently recreates one of the most exciting periods in American history, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, as it vividly portrays the lives of three sisters. Velma Brooks is a young writer inspired by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the other legendary writers who appear as characters in this book. Velma's older sister, Miriam, is a nurse and a dedicated follower of Marcus Garvey, passionately committed to the advancement of Black people. Louise, the youngest of the Brooks sisters, is a beautiful dancer at the fabled Cotton Club, whose light skin wins her a white husband and a ticket out of Harlem. The sisters' fascinating lives are gradually unveiled as they struggle for success and endure troubling romances. Velma discovers that her fellow writers' jealousies can ruin even her closest relationships; Miriam's passion seems reserved exclusively for her political work until she makes a startling discovery; and Louise learns that she must pay a price for her comfortable but dishonest life. *No Easy Place to Be* brilliantly depicts the world of the Roaring Twenties, from the homecoming of the World War I soldiers to the shattering crash of the stock market in 1929.