Jenna Bush Hager says her June 2024 Read With Jenna pick stayed with her, and predicts it will stay with you, too.
She calls Essie Chambers' debut novel "Swift River" a "powerful exploration of identity and love."
The book follows Diamond Newberry, the daughter of a single mother in a small Massachusetts town. Her father disappeared seven years prior, making Diamond the only Black person in Swift River.
When she receives a letter from a relative she didn't know existed, Diamond starts to find her roots. Just as she looks toward the past for the first time, she also takes steps to leave Swift River, getting driver's license and starting to lose the weight she's teased about so often. All the while, her mom Anna becomes more desperate for her to stay.
“Swift River” by Essie Chambers
"'Swift River' is a story filled with secrets: community secrets and family secrets. It is a book that made me cry and then filled me with enormous hope," Jenna says.
Speaking to TODAY, Chambers says the book was inspired, in part, by her childhood growing up as one of only a few people of color in a small town, but that's where the similarities end.
"The basic facts are similar enough that people definitely assume it's partially autobiographical. And it really isn't," she says.
Still, she wanted to capture the specific kind of racism that a person might encounter in a town like Swift River.
"It was important to talk about more of the microaggressions that you experience, where the people who are hurting you, you love. They're your friends and your teachers," she says.
Clouded by her family's reputation and her bullied about her weight, Diamond struggles to feel seen as an individual.
"I feel like the Diamonds of the world often don't get to be the center of a story and they're not humanized. I wanted readers who were Diamond to feel seen and heard and respected. I wanted people who aren't like her to have real empathy and understand what it feels like to move through the world in her body," she says.
She also tries to individuate from her parents and their intense histories. Chambers stresses that Diamond's mom, who is at times fun but at more times neglectful, is nothing like her own mom.
"I did not want (my mom) to see herself in this character," she says, laughing, calling her mom "sweet, kind and gentle."
In the character of Anna, Diamond's mom, Chambers wanted to explore the idea of a parent trying — but not filling her daughter's needs.
"I think that there is something heartbreaking and poignant about parental failure coming from particularly apparent like this who loves her child so much, but it's failing her so profoundly," she says.
While Diamond's dad isn't around in the present day, the book is concerned with his family's path to and from Swift River. The book explores the dark story of Swift River and how, nearly overnight, the town banished all of its Black residents.
Sundown towns, the nickname for all-white municipalities in the U.S., are more often found in the North and Midwest, Chambers found in her research.
"Sundown towns take all forms. It could mean they keep people out through laws and ordinances or violence and terrorism," she says.
While reading "Swift River", Chambers hopes readers are inspired to think back to their own family stories, and "what they might be carrying around them with them that they might need to let go of in order to become who they're meant to be."
"I think that that's what all of the characters are are struggling with: Is home where you came from, or is home where you want to go?" she says.