by Laura Lane McNeal
What a weird book. It was mostly straight narrative, from the points of view of several people but mainly the main character, Ibby, an 11 year old girl whose father had died so her mother dropped off to live with a grandmother she'd never met. The mother was a real piece of work and no one liked her very much, but still a mother--not someone you want to lose track of with no notion where she went, why she went, and was she ever coming back.
The sections that Ibby didn't observe directly are in the POV of Doll (aka Doll Baby), a black woman who works in the grandmother's house, and her mother, Queenie, also working the in grandmother's house. The grandmother is a real nutcase, but a semi-functional one. Her heart is in the right place even if her actions are often odd.
And--here's a warning--a few critical events from the past are told in short flashbacks. I found it irritating, but I wanted to know what happened so badly that I put up with them.
And that's the reason I kind of liked this book. It really kept me interested. And the historical settings (1960s New Orleans) were right on target. Civil rights and demonstrations and irrational police shoots loomed large on the screen, and a whole of things just weren't fair. But it was awfully realistic and eminently believable.
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