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.