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Ellen Isaacs | |
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The story is about Maxine, a black woman executive producer of a TV talk show who has a great life on the surface but is dealing with problems on several fronts. Her show is in danger of being cancelled. The grandmother who raised her, a famous singer from an earlier generation, has lost hope after she had a stroke. And she's still trying to forgive her otherwise wonderful husband Satchel for cheating on her. This book disappointed me. When I read Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, I became a fan of her ability to bring to life many and varied characters, drawing out their different points of view. I was especially impressed with the way she helped you to understand the most unsympathetic of characters. In this book, and to a lesser degree her last one, Brothers and Sisters, the characters seem one-dimensional and flat. The story is fairly predictable and, when everything works out just grand in the end, formulaic and unbelievable. The dialog is stiff, even telegraphic, especially the phone calls between Maxine and Satchel when Maxine is visiting her grandmother. The book was easy to breeze through, but in the end, it wasn't very satisfying.
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