Saturday marks the start of the 24th annual Reading Across Rhode Island program. The goal is to use a single book to spark discussions about topics relevant to the lives of Rhode Islanders.
This year’s pick is Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, a novel inspired by the true story of a secret community of formerly enslaved people in the Appalachians.
Morning Host Luis Hernandez spoke with the chairperson of Reading Across Rhode Island, Amy VanderWeele, about the annual initiative.
On the Reading Across Rhode Island program
Amy VanderWeele: Reading across Rhode Island is really the flagship program of the Rhode Island Center for the Book. Every state has a Center for the Book; it’s associated with the Library of Congress. Reading Across Rhode Island is a program (in which) we try to enlarge a sense of community. We want to get people all across the state reading and talking about a book. A lot of times that can look like a statewide book club, and that’s really the kind of the form it took (in) the first decade or so of Reading Across Rhode Island. In the last eight years, we’ve really been trying to focus on more of a Book-to-Action model. So, choosing a book that gets people excited to make a change within their community.
On this year’s Reading Across Rhode Island book choice
VanderWeele: Our Reading Across Rhode Island 2026 title is Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. It’s fiction, but it’s based on truth. It’s dual narratives, so it’s told from the perspective – one narrative – from a woman in contemporary time out of Washington D.C. who is trying to learn more about her family history. She’s invited back to, kind of, her homeland of North Carolina from D.C. She doesn’t really understand her family’s connection to this land or to this community.
The other narrative is from her great-great-great-great-grandmother, who was a free person – a free Black person – in North Carolina, who founded this self-sufficient black community on the line between North Carolina and South Carolina during Reconstruction, and they formed something called the Kingdom of the Happy Land. They called themselves the King and the Queen of Happy Land. It is really a story about reclamation of land, reclamation of purpose, about finding your connection to your history and your people, and how you take care of one another.
On why Happy Land is relevant to Rhode Islanders
VanderWeele: This book does a great job of focusing on, kind of, the legal process, the land rights process. One of the main characters is trying to reclaim the land owned by this black community. It’s about to be taken away in kind of a predatory way, and so she’s trying to help her grandmother hold on to this land so that they can hold on to their community. There’s actually some interesting land rights legislation happening in Rhode Island right now. So we thought that was kind of an interesting point to it.
I also think that there’s an element of storytelling and history telling. In the contemporary narrative, the character is trying to reclaim some of this history. She goes to the local public library and is trying to learn about the history. (She) can only find a pamphlet written by a court clerk from the 1950s that she knew had some kind of inaccuracies based on the history that her grandmother had been telling her. I think it’s a really interesting examination of who writes history and how important it is that we stay connected to our history and the truths of our history and what that actually means.
