⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez blends past and present into a richly layered story about family, identity, and a nearly forgotten piece of American history. This is a dual-timeline novel, and it works beautifully. In the present day, Nikki Lovejoy-Berry—a Washington, D.C. real estate agent—is summoned to western North Carolina by her estranged grandmother, Mother Rita. What Nikki expects are answers about their fractured family. What she gets instead is a fight. Mother Rita is being pushed off land that has been in their family for generations—land that once formed the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a self-sufficient community built by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. In the historical narrative, […]