Half a Heart Author:Rosellen Brown Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980s. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter born in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Rosellen Brown charts the em... more »otionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and loyalty. With which family, and which race, does she identify? A searingly honest novel of public and private ideals betrayed, Half a Heart is a deeply moving story about estrangement and intimacy, race and privilege, identity and belonging.« less