✌🏻Two for Tuesday ✌🏻- Charmaine Wilkerson

✌🏻Two for Tuesday ✌🏻

Charmaine Wilkerson, the well-know author of Black Cake, is back with her sophomore novel—Good Dirt. Thank you to @booksparks for sending me my copy and having me as an ambassador for their winter reading! #WRC2025 The theme this season is crafting and boy it doesn’t get any better than art + books!

Charmaine knows how to expertly craft a novel. She has a thoughtful, intentional, non-linear way of telling a story. It almost feels like peeling back an onion, bit by bit. In Good Dirt she marries a family drama with a priceless family heirloom—a stoneware jar. We get a little bit of history from the 1800s and the African Americans who were involved in forced labor to make the pottery. She explores, grief, family legacy, and forgiveness. The story centers largely on a murder providing a mysterious tone. It is quite the genre bender! If you liked Black Cake, I’m confident you will enjoy this one too.

💫 Summary 💫

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby’s high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that’s exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what’s happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family’s history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.