Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?

When Hollywood legend Kitty Karr Tate dies at age 81 in 2017, there’s one question the whole world wants answered: why did the iconic white actress leave her billion-dollar fortune to the Black daughters of her co-star in a sitcom that first aired nearly fifty years ago? To find out, debut novelist Paul takes us back to 1930s Winston-Salem where we meet a young Black girl whose mother is determined to give her a better life than the one she herself had. Traversing the Jim Crow south and 1950s Hollywood, Smith introduces us to a fascinating cast of characters, portraying the emerging ties between two show business families and the unlikely road that brought them together, while examining questions of gender, race, privilege, and family.  For fans of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.