What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

[sanguinity]

17. Pearl Cleage, What Crazy Looks Like on an Ordinary Day.

After news of Ava's HIV+ status gets out among her clientele -- thereafter killing her hair salon's business -- Ava decides to cash out and spend a summer at home with her sister, Joyce, in Idlewild, before moving on to what Ava hopes is a fresh start for her in San Francisco. However, Joyce, too, has time and a lump sum on her hands -- life insurance money from her husband's death -- and she has been spending it trying to start an education and self-help network for the teenage girls in town. Ava gets sucked into the work -- first as an extra and able hand, but later because these fights have become her fights, too -- and comes to reconsider whether it's just a mere summer that she wishes to spend in Idlewild.

This was a engrossing, fast read, and even fun. That seems completely improbable, given the seriousness of the nominal topics -- HIV, crack, abandoned babies, elder violence, domestic violence, gang violence, and on -- but Ava and Joyce are a step removed from a good deal of it. I suspect, sometimes, that the issues that Ava and Joyce are dealing with have been somewhat streamlined toward happy endings, but I didn't really mind here; sometimes I want a tale of things mostly working out in the end. (That said, I don't buy that infants experience only physical aftereffects from physical trauma, and am less sanguine about that bit of hand-waving -- and yes, that's your content warning.)

I really enjoyed the romance storyline: Eddie does not tweak my skeeve-o-meter, not one little bit. So refreshing to see a romantic interest who considers himself responsible for his own emotional health, and who, while not considering himself responsible for others' emotional health, does consider it his responsibility to make sure they've got honest information about what he is and is not offering.

I do strongly wish, however, that the principal antagonist of the piece, the minister's wife, was not so one-dimensionally, hypocritically evil. By novel's end, we're given a "solution" to the mystery of her motivation, but I still protest: my problem with her was never lack of known motivation (I'm quite happy to assume there's something motivating a character, even if I don't know what it is), but the shallowness of her portrayal. I like my villains with a little more depth, please.

15. Ernestine and Amanda

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Sandra Belton's Ernestine and Amanda has neither a plot nor particularly interesting characters nor, really, much of anything else to recommend it, except perhaps the salutary message that it's bad to mock fat people because fat people have feelings just like everyone else.

It's hard to imagine a child (for Ernestine and Amanda is a children's book) caring enough about the book to absorb that message, though. The story is told in alternating first person, which might have been interesting I hadn't kept getting confused who was speaking. The characters speak with much the same voice, except that Amanda harps about how fat Ernestine is, while Ernestine complains about how stuck up Amanda is.

One might imagine that by the end of the book Amanda would have seen the error in her ways, and Ernestine would forgive her for her former foolishness, which would have been cliched but would at least have given the book a direction - but no. Right up to the end each girl pounds the exact same note again and again, so the book is a repetitive journey to nowhere.

Also? It's apparently historical fiction. I didn't realize that until I looked the book up on the internet, though, so I can't say I think the time or place are well-described.

21-23. Bharati Mukherjee, Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Wagamese

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( Cut for length and possible spoilers )