Review by Booklist Review
In 1975, the Saville family has won the chance to move into Lakeland, a planned community on Chicago's lakefront. Formed as a social experiment, Lakeland is home to many of the city's elite black professionals, but for 11-year-old Tempest, the residents, with their expensive clothes and prissy manners, have "no color" at all. Slipping outside the walled community through a hole in the fence, she is drawn to the raucous environs of Thirty-fifth Street, particularly Miss Jonetta's liquor store. Tempest comes to look upon the store as a refuge from the pressures of her new life. Then a tragic series of events leads the city fathers to start condemnation proceedings on all the illegal storefronts lining Thirty-fifth Street. Trice's amazingly accomplished debut is filled with memorable characters and images as it lays open the hypocrisy of both the ghetto street preachers and Lakeland's founding fathers. Although the novel suffers from a protracted, overly dramatic ending, Trice's effort to blend metaphor and social realism is striking and inventive. A writer to watch. --Joanne Wilkinson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Narrated from a distance of 20 years, this powerful debut novel re-creates the month that changed the life of a sheltered African American girl, 11-year-old Tempestt "Temmy" Saville, initiating her into the violence and rage her middle-class family thought they had escaped. In Chicago in 1975, Temmy witnesses the death of her best friend. Narrating the tale along with grown-up Temmy is 60-ish Miss Jonetta Goode, a big-hearted former prostitute who keeps watch over the fragile souls on Thirty-fifth Street from behind her counter in O'Cala Food and Drug. Temmy encounters Miss Jonetta and the hellishly fascinating Thirty-fifth Street by escaping Lakeland, the fenced-in enclave of black professionals where her family lives. Sensing that something is bothering her friend, Valerie, who lives part-time in Lakeland with her father and stays the rest of the week with her mother in the projects, Temmy inspires Jonetta to deputize two O'Cala regulars to observe Valerie and her mother. They discover that Ruth has been selling Valerie to men to finance her drug habit. The information comes too late to save Valerie. Temmy, the only witness to her friend's death, is frozen into silence, unable to speak up when a disreputable street preacher is accused and convicted of the girl's murder. Trice creates vibrant characters via the counterpointed voices of Temmie and Jonetta. As each interprets events within the range of her knowledge and expectations, Trice obliquely provides insight into the crucial social issues that help shape the lives of African Americans. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This poignant and melodic first novel describes an 11-year-old girl's exposure to two African American cultures that exist within yards of each other in the Chicago ghetto. Trice tells much of her story through young Tempest Saville, who moves with her family to Lakeland, a planned community in the Chicago ghetto, in search of a better life. While Tempest struggles to define herself within her new surroundings, she finds solace among some adults on 35th Street, a section of the Chicago ghetto outside Lakeland's fence. There, Tempest sees things that her father hoped to shield her from. Miss Joneta, the second narrator, is a woman whose life mirrors 35th Street's culture. Through her story, we see danger and tragedy and meet the people on the other side of the fence. This novel will stay with the reader long after the final chapter has been finished. Recommended for public libraries and also relevant to collections documenting 20th-century urban America.Amy A. Begg, Smithsonian Institution Libs., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
YALakeland community in 1975 Chicago puts a new twist on the idea of a "project." The apartments are large, spacious, furnished, and come equipped with a maid. Residents are invited to join from a lottery pool of "deserving" citizens. Rent is subsidized because the tenants' contributions to Lakeland are to add to its "aesthetic, academic and social achievements." A wall separates it from its direct opposite35th streethome to hookers, thieves, and all the accoutrements of poverty. The Lakelanders feel repugnance toward the less fortunate of 35th Street; they want the area razed and the occupants moved. This prejudice is not racial as the inhabitants of both places are African Americans. When 11-year-old Tempestt Saville and her family move to Lakeland, Tempestt is drawn to both 35th Street and the janitor's daughter, Valerie. During her frequent secret visits beyond the wall, shopkeeper and former prostitute Miss Jonetta Goode becomes her 35th Street guardian angel. The story of Valerie's death, Jonetta's life, and Tempestt's revelations are told in alternating chapters from both Tempestt's and Jonetta's memories. Absorbing, entertaining, and beautifully woven together, this first novel deals with important themes and societal issues: prejudice, child abuse, friendship, love, pride, poverty, drug abuse, and true humanity toward one's fellow humans. A good choice for a teen discussion group.Carol DeAngelo, formerly at Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Chicago Tribune editor Trice brings a light touch of magical realism to this moving tale of violence, urban squalor, and upward mobility among the African-Americans who live in two distinct Chicago neighborhoods during the '70s. The only thing dividing swanky Lakeland from the blight of 35th Street is a fence covered with bushes. On the inside: beautiful apartment houses with model schools, a country club, and all the amenities of upper-middle-class life--a haven for ambitious blacks carved out of the urban landscape. Tempestt Saville, a redheaded 11-year-old, is suddenly dropped down in the sanctuary of Lakeland, where her hardworking father has accepted a job as a teacher. Sharing her mother's misgivings about the snobby inhabitants of this bourgeois retreat, Tempestt is drawn to life outside the gates and discovers a secret door to 35th Street, a decaying sprawl of rib joints, pool halls, saloons, and sidewalk preachers. There is, for instance, Alfred Mayes's ``New Saved'' congregation, a holy-rolling group who proselytize among the pimps, whores, and drunks. Miss Jonetta, who runs a drug- and food-store and tries to rescue lost girls, including ``Child'' (as she calls Tempestt), has a past of her own, having been recruited by Mayes as one of his prostitutes long ago. Nowadays, all the good and honest folk of the neighborhood hang out in her store. Tempestt, meanwhile, befriends Valerie Nicholae, a child of 35th Street who lives in Lakeland with her janitor brother (claiming to be her father). Such surprises are common in the mythically charged world limned by Trice--a world in which the day-to-day struggles of ordinary people assume heroic proportions. The magic is in the telling here, creating a fabulous novel that discovers transcendent possibilities on the mean streets of a city. Trice's greatest achievement may be how effortlessly (and modestly) she manages to mingle an original vision and real art.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
