Raising Redemption

For Alicia Tilman, a seventeen-year-old girl on her way to Radcliffe, meeting her parents' expectations means everything. But when Dickey Samson comes around, Alicia defies her father's longstanding rule that she stay away from the boy, and is unprepared for the consequences that rain down upon her: a baby, a near shooting, estrangment.

Learning the dark family secret behind her father's warning, Alicia leaves her home in Chesapeake, Virginia, and heads for San Francisco, a big city on the opposite coast, whose pictures always look pretty. Alone, pregnant, and homeless, Alicia makes a decision that will alter her relationship with her family forever: making a new home for herself a Lil's Place, an escort service of girls who become Alicia's confidantes, sisters.

After placing her son for adoption, Alicia realizes that success is the only solution to shame, and struggles to become worthy of the symbolic silver teapot handed down among the noble Tilman women. As the years go by, and her efforts build, Alicia is determined to reconnect with her mother, her father, and her son, whose life she had protected at the risk of ruining her own.

Chronicling the hardships and triumphs of four generations, Raising Redemption is a sweeping tribute to the salvation we can only find from within.

R. A. Russell is a practicing business-law attorney in Los Angeles, California. Russell graduated with honors from Claremont McKenna College in 1971 after majoring in history and philosophy. In 1974, Russell graduated from Harvard Law School with an emphasis on corporate and tax law. Raising Redemption is his first novel.