Anyone who grew up a wealthy or middle-class person of color can attest to particular life problems: You are seen as a representative of your “people” wherever you go, microaggressions are standard fare no matter how much authority you have, and the weight of your ancestors is always heavy on your shoulders. In Nancy Johnson’s second novel, People of Means, these problems are expansively explored. Following a mother and daughter, Johnson details the ways racial discrimination changed throughout the 20th century and the ways it remained very much the same.

Freda Gilroy matriculates at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959. Regarded as the most famous Black university in the world, Fisk puts pressure on Freda, who was raised among Chicago’s Black elite, to rise to the heights of Black excellence, fulfilling W.E.B. Du Bois’ plan for the “talented tenth.” Nashville is very different from Chicago, though, and in the South, Freda realizes how protected she had been from the realities of racist discrimination and segregation. After seeing “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs on the bathrooms during a date to the state fair, a small fire lights in Freda, one that will be stoked into a full conflagration.

Decades later, in 1992, Freda’s daughter Tulip has also achieved success with her cushy public relations job. Having fought her way to the top, she starts to take inventory of her life, but when she hears the Rodney King verdict and sees the ensuing riots, Tulip realizes that all she’s accomplished might not be that important to her. Across decades, both mother and daughter are called to question what justice really is and to fight for what they believe in.

In our current political moment, People of Means feels vital. Decades have passed since Tulip’s timeline, and still people are fighting for racial equality. Johnson shows us that the fight will go on, because our thirst for justice is unquenchable.

Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval lived in 16th-century France until she set sail with her guardian, who aimed to establish a colony near what is now Quebec. The facts of Marguerite’s true story are tantalizingly few, but, by all accounts, she and her maid, Damienne, traveled to New France along with a man who was or became Marguerite’s lover on board. Allegra Goodman’s eighth novel, Isola, celebrates this lesser-known historical figure in an exciting, imagined narrative.

When Marguerite’s tryst with her lover, Auguste (her guardian’s secretary), is discovered, her guardian banishes the couple and Damienne to an island, where they must survive the winters and wild beasts however they can. Goodman takes elements from 16th-century tales, including an account in The Heptameron, and fills in the many blanks in Marguerite’s story with exquisitely rendered imaginings of her inner turmoil, capturing all the longing and fiery will to survive that Marguerite finds within herself when her life and the lives of those she loves are at stake.

Goodman effectlively dramatizes the precarious position of a female orphan in the 1500s, even one of means, making Marguerite’s anguish and powerlessness palpable. Though she starts as a naive and untested child, she grows in tenacity and faith in herself throughout her ordeal, her anxiety maturing into a determination and defiance that engages the reader’s sympathy and respect. The intertwining of Renaissance religious beliefs and superstitions supplies an irresistible atmosphere of foreboding to Goodman’s tale, while the first-person point of view immerses the reader in what Marguerite is feeling and learning. “I understand what it is to be a man,” Marguerite says after tragedy has struck the island. “To be a man is to have your way.” Damienne, horrified by this unbecoming attitude, responds, “And is that good? . . . Is it right?” to which Marguerite truthfully replies, “It is satisfying.” 

As a novel of adventure and redemption and as a story of a woman coming into her own, Isola is a rewarding read.

“History,” one of the characters in Good Dirt remarks, “can only be told through a chorus of voices.” Charmaine Wilkerson’s (Black Cake) second novel reminds us that we need access to a multitude of stories for a full understanding of our country’s rich and complicated past.

On her wedding day, Ebony (Ebby) Freeman, the daughter of an affluent Black family in a seaside Connecticut town, finds herself the center of attention for the wrong reason: Her fiancé, Henry, has left her at the altar. And this is not her first time having her pain put in the spotlight. As a child, Ebby witnessed the murder of her 15-year-old brother, Baz, during a home robbery that also destroyed a valuable family heirloom, a clay pot made by an enslaved ancestor. The violent crime has haunted her for years, and the media focus on the Freeman family because of their wealth and race has also taken a toll. Nine months after the broken nuptials, Ebby plans to manage a friend’s guest house in a French village while she devotes herself to gathering family stories about the pot that was broken during the robbery. But when Henry and his new girlfriend turn out to be the house’s first guests, Ebby’s hopes for a restorative working vacation go awry. 

Wilkerson chose a nonlinear narrative to craft this ambitious novel, reaching as far back as the 19th century when the pot was created and brought from South Carolina to Massachusetts, intertwining its legacy with the story of the Freeman family, Henry and Ebby’s courtship and its aftermath, and Ebby’s attempts to heal. Part romantic drama, part history lesson, Good Dirt dilutes its power with a few narrative missteps, and by overextending its reach with characters that are tangential to the plot (like Henry’s rebound girlfriend, Avery). Though the issues she raises don’t get a completely satisfying exploration, readers will be intrigued by Wilkerson’s efforts to illuminate the complex ways in which American history continuously informs the present.