Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions. Read 82 reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. As the hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout 'The City Too Busy to Hate.' A separated mother of three holding down several jobs, Zala Spencer has managed to survive on the margins of a flourishing economy until she awakens the morning of Sunday, July 20, 1980, to find her teenage son Sonny missing. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. Locating the novel in the historical moment of the Atlanta child murders, Bambara examines its black community, voicing the stories overlooked by the.

In a suspenseful novel of uncommon depth and intensity, Toni Cade Bambara renders a harrowing portrait of a city under siege. Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara