Nikki — the main character of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s 2025 novel “Happy Land” — is a busy real estate agent living and working in Washington, D.C. who can’t recall the last book she finished. 

While visiting her maternal grandmother Rita for the first time in the hilly, Appalachian stretches of North Carolina, Nikki is surprised to see her elderly and estranged kin reading plentifully despite never having gone to college. 

Mother Rita offers a scold: “Don’t act like D.C. is someplace special … I’m just as busy as you, and I still find time to read nearly fifty books a year.”

While 50 tomes may be a tall order for most, the Rhode Island Center for the Book is encouraging Ocean State residents to read at least one this year. The nonprofit center at Salve Regina University chose “Happy Land” as its 2026 selection for Reading Across Rhode Island (RARI), a statewide initiative that takes the concept of a book club and widens interest in a particular book to people all over Rhode Island.

A kickoff event where readers can learn about the book and get a free copy is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 24, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Rhode Island State House. Donations covered the cost of 80 copies of the hardcover book that will be given away. A separate author event with Perkins-Valdez is scheduled for April 14, with details and registration to arrive sometime in March at ribook.org. 

Released in April 2025 and due out in paperback in March, “Happy Land” follows Nikki on her trek to a place “where neighbors are too far to be heard and the worst threat to mammals is the crack of a rifle.” Summoned unexpectedly by Mother Rita, Nikki discovers more about her family, as well as a dispute which threatens her grandmother’s comfort and security. Simultaneously, the reader tags along with Nikki’s 19th-century ancestor Luella, a freedwoman who helps create an independent Black kingdom in the Reconstruction era. 

Reading Across Rhode Island began in 2003, in response to the somber mood after 9/11, with librarians, educators and readers working together each year to choose “a single inspiring book as a basis to engage in a statewide dialogue,” said Kate Lentz, the Center for the Book’s director.

An associate professor of literature at American University, Perkins-Valdez has published four books since 2011. Her first book “Wench” fictionalized the lives of four enslaved women and was chosen for a citywide reading initiative in Santa Monica, California, while her own homebase of Washington, D.C. has also selected “Happy Land” for a citywide read in February. She said she’s thrilled each time it happens, because it means more libraries will hold her books, making them “so much more accessible to people to check it out.” 

The public can nominate books for each year’s Reading Across Rhode Island title, and a selection committee reviews the options before making a final choice. Perkins-Valdez’s book beat out three other finalists this year, and impressed community readers like Samely Rosario, a Classical High School student who was among those reviewing the nominations.   

A self-described “slow reader,” Rosario said in a statement shared by the Center for the Book that she was first lured in by the book’s “beautiful” cover art. The reasonable chapter lengths, Rosario said, more readily invited her to get invested in what she found to be a compelling narrative.  

“I honestly didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. It was so emotional and powerful in ways I didn’t see coming,” Rosario said. “And not even gonna lie, it actually brought me out of a reading slump. I hadn’t been excited to read in a while, but this story reminded me why I love books.”

The draw of historical fiction

Another reason Perkins-Valdez likes community-wide reading challenges: “It reaches people in the community who may not typically read historical fiction,” she said.

Perkins-Valdez’s entire oeuvre is this genre she sees as a window into the past and its vastness, and a way for people to access stories they might otherwise miss. When she reads historical fiction, Perkins-Valdez said, she hopes to learn something, leaving with the impression, ‘‘Wow, I didn’t know that.”

“Happy Land” is Perkins-Valdez’s “love letter to the hills of North Carolina, to the people who live in the Appalachian Mountains,” she said, adding that the book is really for “anybody that lives in any kind of small community with an extraordinary story.”

“Because I think a lot of the most extraordinary stories don’t come from the major cities,” Perkins-Valdez said.

A banjo first led Perkins-Valdez up the mountain road to what would become “Happy Land.” 

In late 2021, like many people looking for a hobby during the pandemic, Perkins-Valdez was learning to play the instrument. A search for historical banjo players from western North Carolina routed Perkins-Valdez toward a rabbit hole that ended in a newspaper article: a story about a “reclusive community that named a king and a queen and called themselves royalty,” she said. 

Known as the Kingdom of Happy Land, it was a community of once-enslaved people who settled near the North and South Carolina border after the Civil War. “I thought, ‘Is this true or not?’ I wasn’t sure if it was true,” Perkins-Valdez recalled.

So she reached out to a librarian named Ronnie Pepper at the Henderson County Public Library in Hendersonville, North Carolina, who confirmed the tale. Perkins-Valdez collaborated and shared resources with Pepper over telephone until 2022, when she made her first in-person trip to Hendersonville. There she worked with Pepper and Suzanne Hale, both members of the local Black History Research Committee pushing publicly for the Kingdom to persist in memory. 

The real Kingdom ultimately molded the one crafted in Perkins-Valdez’s book, and Nikki’s research process to find her ancestor echoed her author’s. One scene in the novel has Nikki poring over Federal Slave Schedules in the local library. The not-so-neutral records prove a traumatizing thing for Nikki, who sees her ancestors reduced to line items and rendered not as humans but as property. 

“Maybe this is why a lot of Black people don’t know our history,” Nikki narrates. “Just the search requires fortitude.”

It’s a process Perkins-Valdez herself navigates with a mix of sensitivity and toughness. She said she has not researched her own family history in any thorough way.

“It’s very emotionally difficult to look through it for African Americans, because some of that history can be quite dark,” Perkins-Valdez said. “When I’m researching this about other people, I can put a little bit more emotional distance than if I were researching my own family.”

To migrate or not to migrate

Perkins-Valdez’s more immediate family did, however, inform parts of the emotional terrain in “Happy Land” — specifically, the distance between migrating children and their parents. Perkins-Valdez distilled this theme via Nikki’s mother, whose decision to move away from the mountains carves a multi-generational rift with her own mother Rita.

“There’s something real there in terms of the relationship between the migrant and the person who didn’t migrate,” Perkins-Valdez said.

The author’s back-and-forth with her own mother is much gentler and lacks the tension of the family fictionalized in the book, she said, but shades of bittersweetness remain.  

“One of the things that I tapped into with Nikki was, I’m from Memphis, and I moved away, and I was the only of my siblings to move away, and to this day, my mother asks me, ‘When am I coming back?’ It breaks her heart.”

Her mother still sends an occasional Memphis job posting. Perkins-Valdez counters that her retired mom could always move closer to her daughter.

“I still hold Memphis close to my heart, but so many of my friends who migrated away will say, I’ll never move back,” Perkins-Valdez said. “I do think there’s a feeling of the people who stayed home that we kind of left them behind. …I‘ve made a whole life here in D.C.”

She’s more of a reader than Nikki, but not any less busy in her personal and professional life. Books require a measure of devotion to materialize, and Perkins-Valdez said she’s improved over the years at “how to get the work done in the face of a busy life,” such as 25-minute writing sprints just to get something down.

Organizing the daily stuff is not necessarily easier. Perkins-Valdez referenced an interview with Aretha Franklin: “They asked her what was the hardest thing about being a traveling superstar singer. And she said ‘figuring out what’s for dinner.’ I felt that.”    

But Perkins-Valdez does know the flavor she seeks from a piece of prose. She said she sometimes asks herself of her students’ most memorable works, “Why do I remember, out of the hundreds of stories I read, why are there some that stay with me for years?” 

Perkins-Valdez argued those lasting impressions come from writers who “access that part of yourself that a lot of people don’t want to access.”

“As a writer, that is what I’m trying to capture,” she continued. “I’m trying to capture something that sticks with the reader, that kind of sticks to the ribs, as we say in the South.”