Mama Day /

The beauty of Naylor's prose is its plainness, and the secret power of her third novel is that she does not simply tell a story but brings you face to face with human beings living through the complexity, pain and mystery of real life. But Mama Day is a black story as well as a human story, which is, paradoxically, what makes it such an all-encompassing experience. A young black couple meet in New York and fall in love. Ophelia (``Cocoa'') is from Willow Island, off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia but part of neither state, and George is an orphan who was born and raised in New York. Every August, Cocoa visits her grandmother Abigail and great-aunt Miranda (``Mama Day'') back home. The lure of New York and the magic of home and Mama Day's folk medicines and mystical powers pull at the couple and bring about unforeseen, yet utterly believable, changes in them and their relationship. Naylor interweaves three simple narratives,Cocoa and George alternately tell about their relationship, while a third-person narrative relates the story of Mama Day and Willow Island. The plot is simple; the mystical events of the novel's second part throw a retrospective glow across the more unprepossessing first part, revealing a cornucopia of spiritual and religious themes throughout. Naylor's (The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills) skills as a teller of tales are equal to her philosophical and moral aims.The rhythmic alternation of voices and locales here has a narcotic effect that inspires trust and belief in both Mama Day and Naylor herself, who illustrates with convincing simplicity and clear-sighted intelligence the magical interconnectedness of people with nature, with God and with each other. $100,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild selection; author tour. (February 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Willow Springs is a sparsely populated sea island just off America's southeastern coast whose small black community is dominated by the elderly matriarch, Miranda ``Mama'' Day. When Mama Day's greatniece, Cocoa, marries, she returns to Willow Springs with her husband for an extended visit. Once there, strange forcesboth natural and supernaturalwork to separate the couple. After visiting the menacing Ruby, a local root doctor, Cocoa becomes dangerously ill, and the struggle for her life showcases Naylor's talent for descriptive prose. Though the novel as a whole fairly breathes with life, it is marred by the unintentionally comic death of a major character, who is attacked by a vicious chicken. This farm boy was not convinced. Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

For her third novel, Naylor again creates a mythical black community, but this one--unlike inner-city Brewster Place or suburban Linden Hills--thrives by virtue of its intense isolation. A few miles off the shore of Georgia and South Carolina lies Willow Springs, a self-sustaining and self-regulating island, legally beholden to no state. This little pre-modern society exists on 49 square miles of myth and legends, most of which center on the Day family, a matriarchy descended from a white slaver and his shrewd slave woman. In the time of the novel--the early 1980's--the Days survive through Miranda ""Mama"" Day, an uncommonly resourceful old woman; her sister, Abigail, herself of gentler mein; and Abigail's granddaughter, Ophelia, the spunky young woman known on the island by her ""crib names,"" Cocoa and Baby Girl. Half of the novel is a lover's dialogue between the stubborn, mainland-educated girl and the man who becomes her husband, George Andrews, a whore's abandoned son, who grew up in a Harlem shelter, worked his way through Columbia, and became a partner in a burgeoning engineering business. The New York City courtship of super-straight George and salty Ophelia, played out with all the familiar psychologisms of our time, evolves into romance of cosmic proportions--something that becomes apparent only when, married four years, they both vacation on Willow Springs. Despite Naylor's gentle poke at modern cultural ethnographers, her island narrative--the third-person passages interspersed between the lovers' plaints--is a highly poeticized (and, of course, fictional) version of the anthropologist's art. Aside from learning the lore and legends, and the customs and crafts of the island, we also meet its often comic inhabitants, all of whom respect the supernatural forces that clash at the novel's end. The obvious parallels in Shakespeare, as well as in Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, help distract from the cheaper gothic touches of the final island scenes: premonitions fulfilled, moldy tomes, and lots of lightning. Naylor juxtaposes real and imagined cultures with a mostly even hand. At best then, a love lyric to the persistence of memory. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.