Viewpoint: Searching for Tina Turner by Jacqueline E. Luckett

Lena Harrison Spencer did everything "right": she married a charming and upwardly mobile man, she put her dreams on hold to support his career, and she gave birth to two beautiful children.  Despite having achieved the outward appearance of the perfect upper middle class family, however, Lena's personal life is far from ideal.  Her husband Randall is both distant and controlling, her teenage daughter Camille doesn't respect the sacrifices Lena made to be a stay at home mother, and her son Kendrick has developed a drug addiction while away at college.  Lena knows that something needs to change about her life, but when Randall gives her an ultimatum -- be happy with the status quo or expect a divorce -- she begins to wonder whether she can continue to put other people's wants and needs before her own.  When she decides to make her own happiness a priority, the divorce, though painful, provides her with the tools she needs to believe in her own agency to act without Randall's power plays informing her every move.  With Tina Turner's strength providing inspiration along the way, Lena finds that she's stronger and braver than she could have ever imagined.

It's difficult to write this next part without resorting to flailing at the keyboard in a mad fit of unprofessional glee, but I'll do my best.  Here goes nothing.  I loved this book.  Loved it.  I wanted to run to my friend's nearby apartment to bang on her door, brandish this book at her, and yell, "This is what an awesome female protagonist looks like!"

And it's exactly like what an awesome female protagonist looks like, because Lena Harrison is really and truly an amazing woman.  I love that when Lena is told she is indomitable, it's a fitting description.  I love her passion for photography.  I love how she grows more self-assured and able to stand up for herself as the novel progresses, and I love that this self-assurance culminates in her measured and well-reasoned puncturing of Randall's obnoxious belief that he'll be so easily forgiven.  I love that Lena, Cheryl, Harmon, and Bruce discuss race, patrimony, and stereotypes from both an American and a French perspective.  I love being able to read about how Lena and Cheryl, as single black women in a foreign country, experience a different side of traveling abroad than I ever have, and I love their different ways of handling the ignorant and sometimes downright creepy behavior.*  I love that Lena's eventual response to "What's Love Got To Do With It" is "'ME...THAT'S WHAT LOVE HAS TO DO WITH...EVERYTHING!!'"

In American mainstream literature, there has been a dearth of books published in the last several years about both middle aged female protagonists and protagonists who are people of color. Perhaps it's a symptom of authors not writing these characters because they feel there's no market for them.  Maybe it's the result of manuscripts with protagonists who are graying women in their fifties, or men, women and trans people of color who don't fit the W.A.S.P. mold for interests, backgrounds, and behaviors being rejected for publication for aforementioned lack of marketability.  Regardless, finding good mainstream literature by American authors with these sorts of protagonists can be difficult, and when the two are combined -- a middle aged female person of color -- the search becomes that much harder.  Enter Lena Harrison, fifty-four year old woman of color and passionate, lively, indomitable protagonist of her story.  Have I mentioned how much I love her?

Searching for Tina Turner is creative, inspiring, sexy, beautiful, and an absolute and unequivocal delight to read.  It's a book that I will definitely read again.  This fantastic novel is only the first of what I hope will be many more to come from Jacqueline Luckett.  Her formidable talent (and the teaser for her next book) has left me desperate for another.  Until then, I'll be rereading Searching for Tina Turner and wishing I were back in Paris.

ETA: *And by "love reading about issues POC face on vacation" I mean I love having my eyes opened and being asked to reexamine my privilege from yet another angle that I have, as a white woman, not previously given any thought to because my privilege has given me that freedom, and have taken for granted that when I'm on vacation in Europe I'm not going to be treated as the object of anyone's lustful fantasies simply because my skin color makes me exotic.  The sentence in question is vague and somewhat condescending in retrospect (shades of "hey, oblivious white girl gawking at the diversity"), and I hope I didn't fail too hard.

Viewpoint: The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

What happens to a companion pony when its racehorse suddenly dies?  The analogy is a running theme in Jandy Nelson's young adult novel The Sky is Everywhere, a story about the grief sixteen year old Lennie struggles with when her older sister Bailey unexpectedly passes away.  In the days and weeks following Bailey's death, Lennie's search for her own sense of self leads her down a path filled with poor judgment and selfish decisions.

Nelson's dual Masters of Fine Arts served her well in the writing of The Sky is Everywhere.  She is an extremely talented writer, and very capably handles the subjects of death and mourning.  Her main character reads as a realistic teenager, and her supporting characters are all interesting, lively people that I'd be thrilled to have as acquaintances in the real world.  The relationships between the members of the Walker family are portrayed beautifully, with the absent relatives as much a tangible presence as six feet tall Gram and pothead Lothario Uncle Big.  However, I felt immensely conflicted over this story from near the start, and remained so until the last page. 

The source of my contention with The Sky is Everywhere lies with Lennie, the realistic teenage protagonist.  Lennie compares herself to a companion pony (and her sister Bailey to a racehorse) several times over the course of the novel.  She doesn't want to come in first, and even goes so far as to throw the audition for first chair in the high school orchestra so that she can continue to play clarinet in the position of second chair.  She doesn't believe she's anything approaching above average in looks, although the handsome new student thinks she's beautiful.  She's had sixteen years of practice being the mirror held up to her sister's bright light, and reflecting someone else's confidence, charm, and beauty has been satisfying enough.  With Bailey gone, there's no light to reflect, and she's floundering.

Moreover, Nelson resorted -- as many authors of books geared toward teenage girls do -- to using a classic novel as shorthand for her protagonist's erudition, intellect, and emotional depth.  It's always interesting to come across novels where this device is employed, as the classic novel referenced often acts as a litmus test for the female protagonist's personality, and for how she interacts with the male romantic interests in the story.  When Pride and Prejudice is the favored book, the protagonist is typically smart, headstrong, outspoken, independent, and interested in romance but not to an absurd degree.  When the book is Anne of Green Gables, the protagonist is quirky, outgoing, a free spirit, and a dreamer.

In The Sky is Everywhere, Lennie's favorite book -- the book she's read twenty three times -- is Wuthering Heights.  Nelson's use of Wuthering Heights is no doubt intended to indicate that Lennie is fond of classic literature, that beneath her quiet exterior lies an insatiable romantic core, that Lennie will always be in pursuit of the ideal passion-filled romance, but that's not how it reads to me.  Wuthering Heights is a novel about a woman who chose pragmatism over passion, and how the abused boy she tried to protect became an abusive monster fueled by thoughts of revenge not only on his lost love, but on her husband and her children.  Not sexy, not romantic.  Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, and Cathy are mentioned approximately thirty times over the course of the novel, and every time it's a reminder to me that the book that Lennie has read nearly to the point of memorization is the same one that showcases one of the most unhealthy and obsessive romances ever written.  Near the end of the book, Lennie and her Gram destroy the well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights with Gram's garden shears, and I let out an impromptu cheer in the privacy of my living room -- but alas, a few chapters later, Lennie declares passionately to her love interest, '"I want to be with you forever!"'  As Lennie says, 'You can chop the Victorian novel to shreds with garden shears but you can't take it out of the girl.'  More's the pity.

In Emily Bronte's world -- and through the lens that Lennie views the book -- Heathcliff is a sympathetic character, though outside of a fictional universe the cruel acts that he commits would have landed him in prison for an extended stay.  This is not a book that teenage girls need to be looking to for inspiration on their love lives, or for examples of healthy and functional romantic relationships.  Wuthering Heights is consistently at the top of my list of books that I cannot stand, and to see it mentioned with such frequency in The Sky is Everywhere that it practically qualified as a character was highly problematic for me.

It is entirely possible that I am being too judgmental.  Wuthering Heights is a book that brings out a knee jerk negative reaction in me.  I was busy reading and rereading Mariel of Redwall and all of Tamora Pierce's books in elementary school and middle school, and not one of those characters was ever obsessively, overwhelmingly focused on romance -- and none of them ever used Wuthering Heights as their playbook for romance, either.

In brief: the supporting characters were fantastic, and Nelson has a tremendous way with words.  However, Lennie's obsession with Wuthering Heights was an insurmountable problem, and I wish that Nelson had made her protagonist a little less ordinary and a little more awesome.

BibliovoRX: a spoonful of sugar makes....

We've had a long, weird month of freedom to run around and to do our best to embody the saying, "mad as a March hare."  We've worn shorts to work, celebrated (or lamented) the passage of the health care reform bill, slept without blankets on the bed for the first time this year, contemplated women's rights and achievements, and griped our way through adjusting to Daylight Savings Time.  In short, we went a bit nuts.  To get us back to a more secure state of sanity, it's time for the experimental trials to start up again. 

Don't be shy.  Whether you side with Eliot and think that "April is the cruelest month," or take Chaucer's stance that "April with his showers sweet" will spur you into taking a pilgrimage, there is a book here for you.  Below, a backwards thriller, an endearingly different schoolboy, unsympathetic protagonists, and devout monks.