Grade: 4 out of 5
Identity, attitudes, and culture collide as a mother and daughter’s values and backgrounds are challenged by everyone around them in this moving, often humorous, and unforgettable novel from laura castoro.
It ain’t easy being biracial and a trust fund baby, but blue-eyed Jesse Morgan is determined to just be herself at an eastern college—where no one will know who or what she is…unless she chooses to tell them. What Jesse doesn’t yet realize is that “no past” doesn’t equal “no problems.”
High-powered executive Thea Morgan is marrying Rev. Xavier Thornton—the former athlete and successful black businessman-turned-pastor, a man she first fell in love with at sixteen. A fair-skinned black woman who cracked the glass ceiling in the Texas oil business, Thea assumes her identity difficulties are behind her. She hasn’t yet met Xavier’s new congregation in a down-on-its-luck Arkansas town…nor Mrs. Hattie Patterson—the matriarch of St. Hurricane Church who has fixed opinions about how a minister’s wife should behave. Will Thea lose her struggles to win over Xavier’s congregation, people who just don’t understand her big-city ways? It will take every bit of her humor, business acumen, and just plain hard-loving to deal with her crisis of faith and the sinking feeling that, just maybe, love can’t conquer all.
Like mother, like daughter, Thea and Jesse discover that sometimes to get what you need most you to have to put everything, even love, on the line.
I can’t exactly pinpoint what I thought this book would be about but I could tell you that I wasn’t expecting what I got. I was expecting something light and fluffy but what I got was the exact opposite of that. This is a story about the evolving relationship between a mother and daughter but also about the changes that two women go through over the course of their lives.
You’ve got Thea, who is about to marry Xavier Thornton, an ex-athlete turned minister. They’ve known each other for years and they’ve got some history. They’ve come together again and found a love that suits them both. At work, Thea is thriving, she’s just been offered a promotion but she battles with the decision to accept the job or not because she hadn’t yet made any kind of decision with Xavier about where they were going to live, what they were going to do after the wedding and so Thea’s got a lot of things that she must work through and difficult decisions she must make and problems that she must overcome throughout the length of this story.
Thea’s got a daughter named Jesse who is at that age in her life when she’s tested to see what kind of person she is. She’s going through her own changes and it was really interesting to read her part of the book because she’s getting pulled in all these different directions and I ended up really liking her character. She did the best that she could considering and I just really enjoyed reading about her struggles.
This whole book was one of those emotional stories that you weren’t quite expecting but enjoyed anyway. We read about different topics that make for a really great read. It’s character driven and I was really glad that I read it. It’s one of those books where you had to take a few days after finishing it to gather your thoughts on the book because you liked it and you want other people to give it a chance. It’s one of those books that if you stick around long enough, you’ll be rewarded with a prize, kinda like a Cracker Jacks box…if you keep eating, eventually you’ll get to the prize at the bottom and I really do think that this book was a gem of a book and I’m glad that I read it. It’s not one of those light and fluffy romance novels that we’re all used to, that’s for sure but it’s good anyway.
This book is available from Avon A. You can buy it here or here in e-format.