The Davenports

The Davenports is Krystal Marquis's 2023 debut, a young adult historical novel set in Chicago in 1910 among one of the few Black families of immense wealth and status in the United States. The family fortune was built by William Davenport, a formerly enslaved man who founded the Davenport Carriage Company, and the household his children have grown up in is one of servants, chandeliers and endless parties. Marquis drew the premise from the real-life story of C.R. Patterson and his family, whose carriage works became the first Black-owned automobile company in America.

The story is told through four young women in alternating third-person perspectives. Olivia, the elder Davenport daughter, is prepared to marry as duty requires until she meets the civil rights leader Washington DeWight and begins to see how little her family's money shields her from the Jim Crow laws moving north. Her younger sister Helen would rather repair cars than be courted, and finds herself drawn to the suitor her parents have chosen for Olivia. Amy-Rose, a childhood friend turned lady's maid to the sisters, wants a business of her own and loves the one man she is not supposed to — the Davenport son, John. Ruby, Olivia's best friend, has her own designs on John and family pressure of her own.

Reviewers described it as a light, entertaining, plot-driven romance carried by its glamour, its descriptive setting and its four interwoven storylines, while taking seriously the questions of class, race, gender and privilege that shape the Black elite of the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age. The book became a New York Times bestseller, won the 2023 Heartland Booksellers Award and the 2024 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Debut, and is the first of a duology, followed by The Davenports: More Than This.