Love on the Line: A Novel

Identity, attitudes, and culture collide as a mother and daughter's values and backgrounds are challenged by everyone around them in this newly updated version of a Laura Castoro classic.

Thea Morgan—no, Thornton—is thrilled about starting life with her new husband Xavier. After so many years apart, it was truly a blessing that they found each other again. But the new life is going to take some adjustment.

Used to being high-powered lawyer, Thea is having difficulty balancing that with her new role as the preacher’s wife in small town Arkansas. And the townspeople in Xavier’s new parish are watching her life a hawk—most of all, Mrs. Hattie Patterson, the chairwoman of Pastoral Relations Committee, who has her own ideas about how things should be done. With her demanding job and light skin, Thea will have to go far to prove to the people—Mrs. Hattie—of St. Hurricane AME Church that she can be who she is and still be one of them.

On the other side of the country, Thea’s daughter Jesse is having an identity crisis of her own. Off at college and away from those who’ve known her for her entire life, Jesse has the chance to reinvent herself. But is it a chance worth taking? The child of a light-skinned black woman and a white man, Jesse has blond hair and blue eyes. No one would know her heritage if she didn’t tell them, leaving Jesse to face a difficult realization: is she forging a new path in life, free of any preconceived notions? Or is she hiding her identity and denying her roots?

With skill and grace, Laura Castoro deftly examines issues of race and women’s place in the world that fans, new and old, will revel in for years to come.