A daughter's future and her father's past converge in this explosive first novel exploring identity, assimilation, and the legacy of race.

"My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable." When Emma Boudreaux's older brother, Bernie, winds up in a coma after a freak accident, it's as if she loses a part of herself. All their lives, he has served as her compass, her stronger, better half: Bernie was brilliant when Emma was smart, charismatic when she was awkward, and confident when she was shy. Only Bernie was able to navigate — if not always diplomatically — the terrain of their biracial identity. Now, as the chronic rash that's flared up throughout her life returns with a vengeance, Emma is sleepwalking through her first year at college, left alone to grow into herself.

The key to Emma's self-discovery lies in her father's past. Esteemed Princeton professor Bernard Boudreaux is emotionally absent and secretive about his family history. Little does Emma know just how haunted that history is, how tortured the path from the Deep South town to his present Ivy League success has been. Though her father and brother are bound by the past, Emma might just escape.

In exhilarating, magical prose, The Professor's Daughter traces the borderlands of race and family, the contested territory that gives birth to rage, confusion, madness, and invisibility. This striking debut marks the arrival of an astonishingly original voice that surges with energy and purpose.

"A thoughtful, satisfying meditation on race and family history, Raboteau's novel is that rare debut by a young author that stands out not for its stylistic swagger or precocity, but for its simple grace and absolute wisdom. The title character, Emma Boudreaux, and her 'twin' brother, Bernie, are the products of an interracial marriage and an unconventional household. But while Bernie embraces his blackness, Emma is less sure about who she is; still, she chooses to defer to her brother and their shared 'skin.' As an adolescent she only vaguely grasps the mysterious legacy of her black father, who went from an impoverished, segregated Mississippi childhood — his own father having been publicly lynched — to an esteemed academic career at Princeton University. That her father is often absent from family life only deepens Emma's connection with her brother. But when Bernie falls into a coma after a freak accident, Emma, now a freshman at Yale, is forced to reevaluate her identity. With shifting points of view, the novel weaves together unexpected fragments, like a paper Emma 'wrote' for a post-colonial African novel class and her comatose brother's lucid dreams. Drawing from the traditions of African storytelling, the novel maps a mythically rich terrain without ever leaving the confines of American realism. Raboteau, who has already won awards for her fiction, has an assured voice that illuminates pain as acutely as love, and this book flaunts her exceptional storytelling talents." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[An] engaging first novel....The Professor's Daughter movingly takes the African-American tradition of the mixed-race figure into the 21st Century." Chicago Tribune

"Part literary saga, part litany of righteous parables: an impassioned, poetic work that offers commitment as compensation for its overdeterminism." Kirkus Reviews

"The world that Emily Raboteau has so wonderfully created here is at turns harsh, beautiful, strange, and always real. The language of this novel is lyrical, yet precise, at once dissecting the notion of biracial existence and, correctly, stripping it of any currency. This work is unflinchingly intelligent." Percival Everett, author of Erasure

A daughter's future and her father's past converge in this explosive first novel exploring identity, assimilation, and the legacy of race, and marking the arrival of an astonishingly original voice that surges with energy and purpose.

Emily Raboteau holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, where she was a New York Times Fellow. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship. Her stories have been published in Tin House, The Missouri Review, and Best American Short Stories 2003. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at the City College of New York.