The Fleeing Season: An American Mother's Migration Toward Safety and Justice
The Fleeing
Season
An American Mother's Migration Toward Safety and Justice
What does it mean to flee a country you love — not in desperation, but in conscience?
An intimate, unflinching, and deeply political memoir of motherhood, migration, and the price of safety. One woman's reckoning with the promise — and failure — of the American Dream. The Fleeing Season maps a path toward reproductive justice.
What Readers Are Already Saying
The Fleeing Season is a clear-eyed, unflinching account of a Black mother's decision to keep her children safe amid the multiple system failures that constitute modern American life. With tremendous heart, deep analysis, and moving prose, Jamie D. Brooks powerfully recounts her family's move abroad, away from gun violence, inadequate healthcare, and racial injustice and toward a more just and sustainable future.
Ashley Howard Author, Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement
Brooks understands that Black people have always moved in search of freedom and safety. Her book insists on a truth I hold deeply: Love is essential, but love without supportive structures leaves families exposed. It left me pondering what I owe, as both a parent and a person, to building a world where families can truly be safe.
Zach Norris Author, Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment; Co-Executive Director, The Black Organizing Project
The Fleeing Season is for all of us who have wondered in recent years: How will I know when it's time to go? Jamie D. Brooks skillfully blends anecdotes from family life with reflections on contemporary U.S. politics and public health data to explain how she decided to move her family overseas and toward the possibility of a safer and less chaotic future. Brooks offers us the gift of her insights as a Black mother, the descendant of those whose participation in the Great Migration took them on a similar journey, from the authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South to new lands where their children might taste freedom and thrive. Brooks's writing is engaging and urgent, and this book is a necessary guide in these uncertain times.
Dani McClain Author, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood
Brooks deftly weaves the data and headlines of a seismic national moment into the intimate texture of a single life — making the personal impossible to separate from the political.
This is not a comfort read. It is a clear-eyed account of what it costs to act on one's convictions — told with the precision of a lawyer and the honesty of a mother.
At its core, The Fleeing Season is a book about the right to raise children in safety and health — and what happens when a country stops guaranteeing that right.
A Book Whose Moment Has Finally Arrived
In its 250th year, America is grappling with a question it has never had to ask: What happens when its own citizens choose to leave?
For years, migration stories moved in one direction — toward America. Now, a quiet but seismic reversal is underway. Beneath the headlines about deportations and border crackdowns lies a less-reported exodus: American citizens, many of them middle-class families, are packing up and starting over abroad. Not fleeing poverty. Fleeing fear.
America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2026
The Fleeing Season is not a political polemic. It is the intimate, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable account of one American mother who made this choice before it had a name — and has been living its consequences ever since. She saw the wave coming. This memoir is the record of why she moved to higher ground.
A Story That Subverts Every Migration Narrative You Know
Migration is most often told as a story of deprivation — people fleeing poverty, violence, or collapse. This memoir tells a different, more unsettling story: what it means to leave when you have every advantage, and still find that not enough.
Anchored by a fierce commitment to reproductive justice — the right not only to have or not have children, but to raise them in safety and health — the author found the promise of the American Dream hollow. When the chance to leave came, she took it.
Now living in the U.K., she does not offer easy answers. Through personal narrative and critical reflection, she interrogates her new home with the same unflinching eye — sometimes arriving at unexpected and uncomfortable conclusions. Britain is not a utopia. But the questions she carries across the Atlantic are universal.
- What does it mean to raise children in safety and freedom — and at what cost?
- Is a new home immune to the forces that drove you from the old one?
- How do our deepest convictions about justice shape the geography of our lives?
- What do we owe the place we leave — and the place that takes us in?
- When does leaving become an act of conscience rather than escape?
The Intimate and the Political, Woven Together
The right to raise children in safe, healthy environments is not abstract — it is the force that moves families across oceans and borders.
What does it mean to flee with advantages most migrants never have? This memoir refuses to look away from that tension.
The new home is examined without sentimentality. The author's critical lens does not soften when she turns it on the country that welcomed her.
The American exodus has a name. Now it has a face.
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