Denene Millner On Her Tender Family Saga And Discovering “Beauty On The Page”

Denene Millner’s One Blood dives into the lives of three generations of Black women, exploring how their individual struggles for autonomy and self-knowledge are connected across time. Grace is a vibrant teenager who leads an idyllic life in 1960s Virginia under the care of her beloved grandmother. Lolo is a recently married young woman in New York whose intelligence and wit buoy her family and protect her from secrets from her past. Rae, the baby that Grace gave birth to and whom Lolo adopted, is now a young woman about to become a mother herself in the early 2000s. Rae discovered she was adopted when she was twelve, but her pregnancy causes her to pose critical questions to Lolo and learn more about her own origin. Told with incredible tenderness, One Blood spans decades to tell an incredibly moving story about motherhood, healing, and generational trauma. In its starred review, Library Journal raved, “Millner beautifully limns the experiences of a woman who must give up her child, a mother who has adopted, and Black women everywhere who must negotiate the roles of wife and mother while entertaining their own dreams.” Denene Millner spoke to us about how her own background informed her novel, how she crafted her characters, and bringing different periods of history to life.