cover image Getting Our Breath Back

Getting Our Breath Back

Shawne Johnson. Dutton Books, $22.95 (261pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94654-0

Three sisters both lose and find themselves in the political and social upheavals of 1960s and '70s Philadelphia in Shawne Johnson's impressionistic, earnest debut novel, Getting Our Breath Back. Oldest sister Violet has nearly made herself ill trying to be a proper wife, but it hasn't stopped her husband from chasing skirts. Middle sister Lilly was once a college student, an aspiring writer and a Black Panther, but is now majoring in heroin, while baby sister Rose is a sculptor and single mother who can't seem to settle on a husband. All three women witness the erosion of their formerly middle-class old neighborhood and participate in the other cataclysmic social changes of their day.