Summer came to Atlanta like a verdict.

In Chapter 1 of Club Candy, we enter the world of Eleanor Reynolds — a mother of six living in the Techwood Homes project, holding her family together with nothing but faith, arithmetic, and sheer will. The heat is suffocating. The rent is due. And her children are standing outside a store window watching white children walk out with popsicles they can't afford.

One nickel. That's all it costs.

And it might as well be the moon.

This is where Club Candy begins — not in the club, not under the neon lights, but in a four-room apartment in 1960s Atlanta where a woman makes a silent promise to God and decides that her children will taste sweetness in a world that keeps serving them bitterness.

Eleanor Reynolds is about to wage a war.

Her weapon is sugar and ice.