Two motherless girls are connected by their love for one another and commitment to each other and it is so sadly beautiful. I love a coming of age story - bildungsroman, if you’re nasty - and this one is first rate. Vernice is the daughter of a murderer and the woman he killed, Annie is the daughter of a no account runaway and God-knows-who, but they shared a cradle as babies and are sisters of the heart growing up in a small town in the south.
Vernice graduates and goes to Spellman where she learns how the other half lives and Annie goes to Memphis to search for her mother to the point of obsession.
Their two paths are different, but they stay connected.
Each of the girls is distinct in the way they interact with the people around them. I glossed over in the beginning where one of them is supposed to be conventionally pretty and the other not, but for the first half of the book I thought it was the other way around because of the way they navigated the world. They both feel like real people trying to do the best that they can with what was given them. I just loved them.
The secondary characters are amazing as well. No person is just one thing. We don’t always get to know everyone’s motivations, but there is no wrong step. They walk off the page.
The story is a nice juxtaposition of storylines that reminds me of the early 80s books of my youth like LACE, except better written and steeped in accuracy. But I read it like one of those potboilers, I couldn’t put it down once it got going because I had to see how it turned out. Once again, some fancy literary fiction got my lazy ass reading it by giving me a super-compelling story.
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