Stable: A Novel [9781250441188]

Overview

After being sex trafficked by the man she loves and picked up by Newark vice cops, nineteen-year-old Keke sets out on a desperate quest for freedom and a stable life for herself and her young daughter.

Keke is a young mother living in the basement of “Daddy’s” house in Newark, New Jersey. For five years, she has been told that she’ll be able to move upstairs once she and the other “girls” hit the magic number. When that happens, she will no longer have to work the motels along the interstate. Her daughter, Angel, will be able to go to school, and Keke will live with Daddy in a real home, like a real family.

But then Keke gets picked up by vice cops and diverted to a women’s shelter, upending the delicate balance of their lives. Hope for a new life starts shining through the cracks—but she doesn’t trust the system to save her. Unwilling to surrender Angel to foster care, Keke needs to figure out how to get both herself and her daughter to freedom.

A taut, incendiary testament to a mother’s love, set in a rarely depicted community of women surviving unforgiving streets, Stable is an uncompromising evocation of how desperation can drive you through to the light.