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NOTABLE FICTION
(December '06)
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Playing in the Light
Zoe Wicomb
New Press, $24.95, 224pp.
ISBN: 1595580474
Set in 1990s Cape Town, Playing in the Light revolves around Marion, a woman of Afrikaner background, who hates traveling but nonetheless runs a travel agency, and her complex relationship with Brenda, the first black woman she has ever employed. Wicomb depicts the life of a complicated, single woman in a changing and complicated place. Caught up in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the exposures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lead to the discovery of a skeleton in the family cupboard. While her aging father is unable and unwilling to supply the truth, Marion's young employee becomes implicated in the piecing together of Marion's past, leading to a defining transformation and widening of Marion's world.
They Tell Me Of A Home
Daniel Black
St. Martin's Griffin $13.95, 336pp.
ISBN: 0312362838
Twenty-eight-year-old Tommy Lee Tyson steps off the Greyhound bus in his hometown of Swamp Creek, Arkansas--a place he left when he was eighteen, vowing never to return. Yet fate and a Ph.D. in black studies force him back to his rural origins as he seeks to understand himself and the black community that produced him. A cold, nonchalant father and an emotionally indifferent mother make his return, after a ten-year hiatus, practically unbearable, and the discovery of his baby sister's death and her burial in the backyard almost consumes him. His mother watches his agony when he discovers his sister's tombstone, but neither she nor other family members is willing to disclose the secret of her death. Only after being prodded incessantly does his older brother, Willie James, relent and provide Tommy Lee with enough knowledge to figure out exactly what happened and why. Meanwhile, Tommy's seventy-year-old teacher--lying on her deathbed--asks him to remain in Swamp Creek and assume her position as the headmaster of the one-room schoolhouse. He refuses vehemently and she dies having bequeathed him her five thousand-book collection in the hopes that he will change his mind. Over the course of a one-week visit, riddled with tension, heartache, and revelation, Tommy Lee Tyson discovers truths about his family, his community, and his undeniable connection to rural Southern black folk and their ways. .
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When You Dance with the Devil
Gwynne Forster
Kensington Publishers
$24.95, 288pp.
ISBN: 0758213085
Forster (Whatever It Takes; If You Walked in My Shoes) continues her soft-focus chronicle of the Thank the Lord boardinghouse's residents, this time setting a 35-year-old small-town virgin and a high-powered New Yorker on paths to self-discovery. Sara Jolene Tilman, burdened with an ox-sized case of low self-esteem, resolves to finally live life on her own terms after her controlling mother dies. Eager to utilize her new freedom, she moves into Thank the Lord. Meanwhile, Richard Peterson, the by-the-bootstraps executive director of "one of the largest and most prestigious nongovernmental organizations," is suffering a broken heart after learning an old flame is getting married. Burned out from years of globe trotting, womanizing and maintaining his lofty position, Richard heads to Maryland and the boardinghouse. As Jolene looks for love in casual affairs that quickly turn disastrous, Richard tries celibacy and begins funding local community-improvement initiatives. The characters learn their obvious lessons in dreadfully slow fashions, and Forster's prose doesn't help Jolene's endless self-pitying. But the characters' earnestness will appeal to readers looking for a light pick-me-up.
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 The Street Life Series: Is It Suicide or Murder?
by Kevin M. Weeks | |
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Confronting the Color Crisis in the African Diaspora: Emphasis Jamaica
by Louise Spencer-Strachan
|  A Guide to Rescue Black Boys from the Prison System
by Louise Spencer-Strachan
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Trees That Listen
by Floreta Drue
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The Train Ride
by Louise Spencer-Strachan
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