Wake my teenage twins and dash off to my day job. I got up at 5:00 every morning and spent two magical hours before it was time to This: that I was approaching a significant birthday, that I'd always nursed a passion for writingįiction, that I was using more energy forestalling my dream of writing a novel than it would Actually, I didn't even know what the story would be. When I started writing Tumbling, I had not given much thought to the time and place for the 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. With striking lyricism, Diane McKinney-Whetstone keenly guides us through the world of community, family, and the human heart. Tumbling is a beautiftilly rendered, poignant story about the ties that bind us and the secrets that keep us apart. Unexpectedly, Noon rises up and takes the lead in the opposition, fighting for all she's worth to keep her family and community together. When a road planned by the city council threatens to break up this South Philadelphia neighborhood, the community must band together. While she seeks salvation in the church, Herbie gains sexual gratification in the arms of a bewitching jazz singer named Ethel, a woman who profoundly affects both Noon's and Herbie's lives when she leaves with them, first, a baby girl and then later, a five-year-old named Liz.

Its central characters, Herbie and Noon, are a loving but unconventional couple whose marriage remains unconsummated for many years as Noon struggles to repossess her sexuality after a brutal attack in her past.

Diane McKinney-Whetstone's lyrical first novel, Tumbling, vividly captures a tightly knit African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the forties and fifties.

Tumbling by Diane McKinney-Whetstone