This is a provocative, enormously entertaining novel about family, motherhood, and race from the history-making author of The Wind Done Gone.
Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard-educated African-American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.
For Windsor, this is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the source of it, she embarks on a journey into her own rich past: to her Motown childhood, where love came disguised as a sharply dressed gangster; to Harvard, where she endured the humiliation of being an unwed black teenaged mother; to Russia and the brilliant poet Alexander Pushkin, great-grandson of an African slave. As she moves ever closer to the secret that has cast a shadow over her life, she discovers that the half-lies she has fed her son don’t add up to the beauty of the truth.
Balancing sharp-witted humor with profundity, sexiness with psychological depth, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades is an exhilarating ride straight through the racially divided heart of contemporary America that probes the universal question of what it means to be a good mother |