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Corner Store Queen
Paperback
Publisher Price: $56.90
ISBN13: 9785351507835
Publisher: Nadira Vessels
Published: Oct 6 2026
Pages: 174
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.37 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Her brother ran the block. When he got ninety-six months, she got the store - and every loyalty that came with it.
Deja Whitlock is twenty-three years old the morning she puts up the gate alone for the first time. Whitlock Variety has stood on the corner of Twenty-First and Cranbourne since 1978: nineteen feet of frontage, a walk-in cooler that hums a G-flat, and a name her grandfather built. Her brother spent six years using that name as a costume. Now he is upstate, and the store is hers, and every man who walks through the door asks her the same quiet question.
Who's holding it now?
Deja's answer never changes: the store sells food. There is no arrangement.
Keeping that promise costs her more than she can price. The block decides she thinks she is better than it. A police liaison offers her grant money, cameras, and a working streetlight - and a seat in a church basement that half the neighborhood will never forgive. A developer comes for the building with a number big enough to end everything. And a man with four trucks shows up on Thursdays at six in the morning, talks to her about margins instead of her brother, and never once trips a single rule she has set - which turns out to be the most dangerous thing about him.
WHAT'S INSIDE
- A single, unsparing first-person voice: hard-edged, funny, allergic to self-pity
- Present-day Philadelphia rendered as a working neighborhood, not a warning label
- A family saga about obligation, inheritance, and the price of being the responsible one
- A slow-burn romance that refuses to rescue her
- A police-liaison subplot with no easy side to stand on
- Fourteen substantial chapters, an epilogue, and twelve discussion questions for book clubs
- Crime kept firmly off the page - never explained, never glamorised, never sold
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