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Harriet Tubman

Live in Concert: A Novel

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: At least 6 months
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: At least 6 months
Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2025 by Pride
  • Best New Books of Spring 2025 by Bustle
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    Featuring two new songs written for the audiobook and performed by Bob the Drag Queen!

    "Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is magnificent! I want to send to the folks who do the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don't know them, but I want them to read this!" —Whoopi Goldberg

    "It's a knockout." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    "An emotional exploration of religion, external and internalized homophobia, the pressure of progressing Black liberation, and the importance of revisiting the past." —New York magazine

    From RuPaul's Drag Race winner, Traitors contestant, and host of HBO's We're Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and hip-hop.
    In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say.

    Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her.

    She calls upon Darnell, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have a short period of time to write a legendary album she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only create music that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future.

    Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).
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      • Publisher's Weekly

        Starred review from November 18, 2024
        Bob the Drag Queen, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, debuts with a vivacious narrative that sees Harriet Tubman magically brought back to life. Revived in the present day along with a handful of other famous historical figures (Cleopatra has reinvented herself as an Instagram model), Harriet teams up with the narrator, legendary hip-hop producer Darnell Williams, to connect Black people to their ancestry through music. She introduces Darnell to her band, the Freemans, made up of people she freed from slavery. Among them are Odessa, who has a talent for singing and rapping; Buck, a strong and silent guitarist with an intelligent mind; DJ Quakes, so nicknamed because of his Quaker beliefs; and Moses the drummer, who’s Harriet’s younger brother. Darnell helps finish their album, and in turn, Harriet helps Darnell find self-acceptance, having fallen into obscurity after been outed as gay in 2010. Darnell’s reverence for Harriet, “America’s first Black superhero,” makes her feel alive on the page (“She sings as if Dr. Dre and Ella Fitzgerald had a daughter. Angry, strong, and smooth all at once,” Darnell thinks) and the pair’s dialogue provides a nuanced and quick-witted tour of Black history (discussing Black peoples’ complex attitudes toward Frederick Douglass in his lifetime, Harriet says, “I didn’t say ‘hate.’ You up here adding stuff. Everybody respected Frederick Douglass. Even racist white folk”). It’s a knockout. Agent: Tom Flannery, Vigliano Assoc.

    Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

    Languages

    • English

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