The Sixteenth opens on the day sixteen-year-old Kathleen witnesses the near-simultaneous deaths of President John F. Kennedy and her own mother. In the aftermath, her father- Baltimore' s district attorney- collapses under grief, abandoning the family home and leaving Kathleen to care for her two younger sisters. The novel closes in the months before the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the world. Between those two moments, more than fifty years unfold, each traced through the lives of the family' s daughters at the age of sixteen. Their coming-of-age stories intersect with the shifting currents of American history: the rise of feminism, changing racial dynamics, the Vietnam era and its aftermath, the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ visibility, wars abroad, and disasters at home. Against this backdrop, Baltimore itself becomes a living presence- at once resilient and unraveling, a city defined not by monuments but by its people. Spanning generations, The Sixteenth is an inventive family saga about inheritance, silence, and the secrets we choose to pass on by what we say- and what we refuse to tell.
