Ava King is a newly divorced mother of a teenage son when she moves into her grandmother’s posh New Orleans home. Ava is the descendant of slaves, grandma Martha is about as WASP-y as they come, and their connected pasts are one of the plot twists in The Revisioners , a new novel by National Book Award finalist Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. There is some magic in The Revisioners , but it’s less fantasy than testament to intergenerational bonds — in this case between Ava and her great-great-great grandmother, born enslaved on a Louisiana plantation. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton joined On Second Thought to unpack her vision for The Revisioners , and her aim to look deeper at the power passed down through generations of African American families.