For Kenzie, growing up in the Lowe home means opening the bottom drawer of her father's dresser to choose which belt she'll be whipped with that night, furtive trips to the Bee Hive liquor store for her father's vodka, and dreaming of the day she can escape apartment A5.

Buoyed by the lyrical, redemptive voice that distinguished Bernice L. McFadden's earlier novel, The Warmest December tells the powerful, deeply moving story of one family and the alcoholism and abuse that marked all their lives. Moving fluidly between the past and the present--as the adult Kenzie visits the bedside of her dying father--it is an ultimately cathartic tale of hope, healing, and forgiveness.