Finding Grace and Grit

New Orleans author Grace King’s childhood turns from Civil War era refinement to navigating the bayous with her family on a flatboat and then emerging to a different life in New Orleans after the war. In the present day, Meredith Mandin becomes fascinated by the life of Grace King after her husband returns from the war in Afghanistan, and they begin a new direction for their family. In her debut novel, Finding Grace and Grit (Thorncraft 2021), Khristeena Lute shows how Meredith and Grace risk poverty and social suicide as they carve daringly different futures than the ones society had prescribed.

Meredith Mandin is a first-generation college student and a new doctoral candidate. Just as she begins her doctoral program, her mother runs off with a man she just met, and her father is arrested. With a wry sense of humor at the dark and comedic turns of her life, Meredith struggles to parent her daughters and her mother, navigate the treacherous waters of competitive graduate students, and find a job to prevent sliding back into her family’s generational poverty-all while finishing her dissertation on Grace King, a pre-Modernist New Orleans writer.

Meanwhile, in her own time, nine-year-old Grace King survives the Civil War and grows into a strong, southern writer-until her own family’s darkness threatens to destroy her sense of self and identity. Meredith and Grace struggle to define themselves one hundred years apart. Even though they live in different centuries, Finding Grace and Grit shows the darkness southern women often face as well as their resolve to overcome it.