Jeannine Amber

Finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding LiteratureFinalist for a 2018 Southern Book Prize for Biography and History"An absolute must-read" - Shondaland" Rabbit] tells how it went down with brutal honesty and outrageous humor" - New York Times"I know a lot of people think they know what it's like to grow up in the hood. Like maybe they watched a couple of seasons of The Wire and they got the shit all figured out. But TV doesn't tell the whole story." - Ms. PatThey called her Rabbit. Patricia Williams (aka Ms. Pat) was born and raised in Atlanta at the height of the crack epidemic. One of five children, Pat watched as her mother struggled to get by on charity, cons, and petty crimes. At age seven, Pat was taught to roll drunks for money. At twelve, she was targeted for sex by a man eight years her senior. By thirteen, she was pregnant. By fifteen, Pat was a mother of two. Alone at sixteen, Pat was determined to make a better life for her children. But with no job skills and an eighth-grade education, her options were limited. She learned quickly that hustling and humor were the only tools she had to survive. Rabbit is an unflinching memoir of cinematic scope and unexpected humor. With wisdom and humor, Pat gives us a rare glimpse of what it's really like to be a black mom in America.

A spellbinding memoir of a mother's fight to save her daughter from a mysterious brain illness. It began with a seizure on a Brooklyn sidewalk just as fourteen-year-old Niko was preparing to enter one of the country's most competitive high schools. Her immune system had gone haywire and was attacking her brain. Eventually, the once happy, high-achieving teen could no longer read, write, or speak, and her behavior grew increasingly dangerous and erratic. Niko was diagnosed with a catastrophic autoimmune condition--a blow that would challenge everything her mother, journalist Jeannine Amber, thought she knew about motherhood, love and resilience. Desperate for answers, Amber plunged into the medical literature and unearthed a shocking link between her daughter's condition, historical accounts of "demonic possession," and a medical mystery unsolved for nearly a century. Told with unflinching honesty and audacious humor, Amber's story is one of scientific intrigue, hard-fought recovery, and the remarkable power of a mother's love. Telling her story with unflinching honesty, humor, and fiery prose, Amber confronts the most daunting challenge of her life -- how to save her child from disappearing --in an astonishing tale of scientific intrigue, hard-fought recovery, and the remarkable power of a mother's love.