Leaving Cecil Street
by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

. . . though the block had long ago made the transition from white to colored to Negro to Black Is Beautiful, the city still provided street cleaning . . . when the children took to the outside and there was the familiar smack, smack of the double-Dutch rope. The sound was a predictable comfort. Like the sounds of the Corner Boys, a mildly delinquent lot consumed with pilfering Kool cigarettes or the feel of a virgin girl's behind. . . .

As she did in her previous novels Tumbling and Blues Dancing, Diane McKinney-Whetstone once again masterfully renders time and place, character and emotional intensities. It is 1969 and Cecil Street is "feeling some kind of way," so the residents decide to have two block parties this year. These energetic, sensual street celebrations serve as backdrops to the stories of the people on the block. Joe, a long-ago sax player, has turned his eye across the street to a newly arrived young southern beauty even as he is suddenly haunted by memories of his horn-playing nights and his affection for a shy, soft hooker from years ago. Joe's wife, Louise, a licensed practical nurse, is losing her teeth to gum disease and her joy to sensing that Joe's attention has wandered. Their teenage daughter, Shay, is consumed with helping her best friend and next-door neighbor Neet, who has gotten pregnant by a Corner Boy. Neet's mother, Alberta, is shunned by the block because of her immersion in a religion that has no name. As the novel opens, the first block party has ended and a naked woman has secretly taken up residence in Joe and Louise's cellar.

McKinney-Whetstone's superb gift for language and storytelling, for crafting scenes that leave the reader breathless, for distilling complex human emotion in a well-turned phrase, is on full display here. She portrays the community and the times with precision and compassion in an unforgettable story that gets under the skin. As the novel builds to the second block party, the past becomes as immediate as the present, condemnable acts become righteous, and what is tragic is also filled with hope.

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In Blues Dancing, Diane McKinney-Whetstone offers a work that fuses past and present, character and place with a transfixing lyricism that shimmers in its detail. This richly spun story of love, passion, betrayal, and redemption shifts seamlessly between modern-day and 70's Philadelphia when Verdi, the pampered daughter of a prosperous southern preacher, enrolls at the local university. Immediately drawn to Johnson, a fellow student whose city-smart ways are as intriguing as they are shocking, Verdi spirals into an unfamiliar world of erotic love, militant politics, and heroin. Enter Rowe, the conservative professor who rescues Verdi from her addiction even as he falls hopelessly in love with her himself.

Twenty years later, as the novel opens, Verdi and Rowe's comfortable, if unexciting, existence is rocked when Johnson returns to town-and Verdi must grapple with the memories of her old love and the assurance of her new life. Smooth as jazz, belted out with McKinney-Whetstone's signature rhythm and intensity, Blues Dancing is both poignant and compelling, brilliantly capturing the desperate struggle to reconcile passion with accountability and the redemptive powers of love's rediscovery.

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Set in West Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the black upper class . But their lives quickly unravel as their father's lucrative catering business collapses. He disappears and is presumed dead, and their mother suffers an apparent breakdown. The girls are wrenched from their mother, and as the novel opens they are living in foster care in a working-class neighborhood in the home of Mae, a politically connected card shark. Though Mae is filled with syrupy names like "pudding" and "doll face" for the foster girls, she is abusive to her own child, Ramona, a twenty-something stunning beauty. As Ramona struggles with Mae's abuse and her own hatred for the foster children, she also tries to keep at bay a powerful attraction she has for her boyfriend's father.

Diane McKinney-Whetstone richly evokes the early 1960s in West Philadelphia in this spicy story of loss and healing, redemption and love.

Critical Praise

“McKinney-Whetstone solidifies her position as a writer of well-crafted, serious popular fiction.... McKinney-Whetstone is masterful at rendering the spaces between people, giving to the air that separates them a taste, a texture, a soul.”
--Philadelphia Inquirer

“McKinney-Whetstone’s gifts as a writer continue to fascinate.”
--San Francisco Chronicle

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Tumbling
by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

In this deeply textured debut novel, the feel and rhythm of a close-knit African-American community is evoked. Set in South Philadelphia during the 1940s and 1950s, Tumbling combines the mood of an urban community with the vitality of its inhabitants to tell a story in which sorrow and joy come in equal measure.

At the heart of the story is Herbie and Noon, who care deeply for each other but have been unable to consummate their marriage because of a vicious sexual attack in Noon's past. While Noon finds comfort and solace in her church, club-hopping Herbie finds friendship and sexual gratification with jazz singer named Ethel.

Herbie and Noon are blessed with daughters when, on two separate occasions, children are left on their doorstep. On the advice of the community, they take the children into their home, where the girls become inseparable, as if blood sisters.

When a devastating city proposal threatens to put a road through the area, the community must pull together to avoid being pulled apart. Noon becomes the unexpected leader in the struggle to keep both her home and her family whole.

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