Hi,
I am starting an international bookray for this Oprah Book Club
Selection, "River, Cross My Heart". If you are interested in joining
please email me or PM me through bookcrossing. My id there is
travelernnn. Please tell me your location and shipping preferences.
Amazon.com book review:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1999: Breena Clarke's first novel
takes place in Georgetown in 1925, where a large and close-knit
African American community took shape beneath the shadow of
segregation. At the center of the story is baby Clara, who is
swallowed by the Potomac as her sister, Johnnie Mae, cools off in the
brackish water. It's the only place the girls can find relief--they're
banned from the new, clean swimming pool the white kids use.
After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae
hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she'll be able to get
past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes,
"Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a
while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split
the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying
to close up spaces."
Bits of wisdom like this are the book's charm. Most remarkable are the
church scenes, which Clarke renders almost purely in the give-and-take
of voices: the booming preacher's sermon ("The people we love, we only
borrowing them"), and the congregation's "Praise Jesus, Amen"
exclamations. The author based her novel on stories passed down in
Georgetown--tales of that area's first black churches, founded when
people decided they wanted their own place of worship, and implicitly
their own God. In church the novel takes flight. Elsewhere River,
Cross My Heart suffers from clumsy, purple prose, and a plot that
moves forward in labored fits and starts. Clarke painstakingly tries
to re-create this past world, but sometimes it seems her duty to
history is holding her back, bogging her down in period-piece details.
In the effortless church scenes, history loses its gravity and is
absorbed by grace. --Emily White
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