I do not have the admirable patience and determination of a good friend who, in the last year, completed reading everything that Marcel Proust ever wrote. I have more and more frequently abandoned reading that I am not enjoying. I started reading two different books recently (Anthony Doer’s Cloud Cuckooland and Ann Patchett’s This Precious Life), having read their previous novels, but abandoned both less than half way through when I realized I was neither enjoying the experience nor learning anything useful from them. But this debut novel by a Black woman from Chicago’s poor largely black south side is a gem that I devoured in two days and will long remember. She was inspired to start writing it on election night in 2008 with Obama’s victory
In small town fictional Ganton, Indiana in 1997, a bright but poor black 17 year old gets pregnant and is forced by her dysfunctional family to give the boy up for adoption. She later is the only one of them to prosper, getting a scholarship to Yale and then marrying an equally-ambitious and bright black corporate executive and moving to downtown Chicago. But her marriage is strained in 2008 when he wants to start a family and she finally confesses to him that she already has a son that she misses terribly. I won’t give away more of the complex, twisted plot, which morphs into the thriller genre in the last half, then back to deep pathos in the last few of 40 chapters as all the diverse clues come together and many of the characters are reconciled with each other.
The deeply ingrained cruel systemic racism reminded me of that depicted in Jodi Picott’s great novel Small Great Things.
The plot line is somewhat unpredictable but realistic and complex and the main characters are entirely believable, though most are flawed Many readers may feel that for a poor black girl from the Midwest with a teen pregnancy in her past, receiving a scholarship to Yale is unrealistic, but I can assure everyone, from personal experiences there that it is not. In fact the plot is so realistic that some readers may start to question their own parentage -are they adoptees with nefarious relatives concealing their true origins? I know of at least two acquaintances who were adopted by their grandparents as siblings of their biological mothers, a practice that was and probably still is much more common than acknowledged.
I have only one very minor quibble, an obsession of mine. Veins are described as pulsating in anger, with “blood pumping through veins” -when will novelists realize that arteries but not veins pulsate?
An engaging must-read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.
The Passionate Reader 