C. D. Baker, Remembering Stardust (Self-Published 2022).

I didn't want to like C. D. Baker's self-published 1960s retrospective. Generally I find self-published fiction lacking meaningful substance, exhibiting skeletal plot lines and offering little character development. Indeed, there are several ways that Baker's novel disappoints, including at least one potential ethnic slur (p. 347), a possible unlikelihood ("Wheatley Bible Church," an independent, fundamentalist-type congregation observing Communion on "the first Sunday of the month"), and a grammatical construction error ("Maybe Oliver's down-deep desperately needed to sustain," p. 204). The editorial risks of self-publishing are self-apparent. The reader is also left wondering about the date stamps throughout the novel. While providing contextual clues, the specificity of dates are distracting. Why, for example, is Sunday, August 22, 1965, a better choice than simply "late summer 1965"? A specific date causes the reader to anticipate a reason for such precision, and the lack of any textual cohesion with the dates cited draws the reader to ask whether s/he has missed something.

In spite of these small details, however, this a novel worth the reader's time. The author does a better-than-average job in describing the life-time effects of childhood trauma, and renders the pain of family dysfunction and domestic violence in believable ways. Entree into the mind of young adult Oliver, and the growing awareness of his personal history is on target. Like many who experience personal trauma, Oliver is a character who also knows toxic religiosity. Oliver is a believable character because his traumas stem from more than one source, and his responses to these traumas seem very true to life.

Baker weaves into his narrative other interesting characters, including Oliver's father, sister and step-mother, as well as other important people in his life, including a romantic dalliance, a despotic preacher and a soul-saving mystic whose Love (capitalization important) transforms many lives.

Set as it is in the early 1960s in Anywhere, USA, Remembering Stardust evokes the emotion of that era. The reader who lived through the 1960s will be drawn back in time, while those younger have the opportunity to reflect on that era of American life. Political figures (Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barry Goldwater, for example) and musical releases (including those from the Beatles, Dylan and the Byrds) are well-appropriated authorial inclusions.

Not to be missed is the author's well-crafted and meaningful attention to the inner changes of the book's main character, Oliver Goode. Baker artfully utilizes metaphor and spiritual language to convey the inner workings of deep, spiritual transformation.

And what of "Stardust"? You'll have to read the book!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. 

Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (HarperCollins 2022).

I am not native to the South, but I have been living in "Mother Country" (Perry's chapter title description for Virginia) for six years now. As a resident outsider, I learn, on a near daily basis, something new about living in what is the most historic territory in the USA. Some of that knowledge is factual (the first Thanksgiving took place in Virginia on the Berkley Hundred, on the James River in 1619), other is intuitive awareness of a more subtle kind (the way "house" is pronounced varies from location to location in the Old Dominion). My meager understanding of "the South" thus far extends only so far as the Commonwealth of Virginia, and I recognize I have a lot to learn.

Much of that learning can be acquired through carefully written history texts or accessed on any one of multiple websites, from tourism sites, to family history sites, as well as state government sites. Accumulating tidbits of knowledge is quite accessible for even the most casually interested newcomer to a geographical setting. It is much more challenging, indeed, to gain an awareness of the subtleties of context, most of which are not apparent even to those who have lived in an area for generations.

Imani Perry is masterful in creating the literary environment for such nuanced, intuitive learning. Her style

is autobiographical, suffused with multiple references to historical, cultural and literary figures for the multi-faceted world of "the South." Her work reflects a warm personal style, while not neglecting the sturdy necessity of factual moorings.

Her concluding chapters, in particular, are Imani Perry at her best. Her "Magnolia Graves and Easter Lilies: New Orleans" is a candid, appreciative reflection of her childhood home. Her craft shines as she interweaves her family's personal history with contextual details about Louisiana that are distinctly revelatory. While she does well in describing the other parts of the South, Perry shines with her chapter about Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular. In this chapter, don't miss her intriguing history of the United Fruit Company and its Louisiana/Central American connections.

Her final chapter may be a bit of a surprise for the unsuspecting reader, because the author sees The Bahamas and Havana as part of "the South." With convincing detail she makes the connections between the USA cultural south and these two Caribbean nations. If you mentally puzzle about the deep and abiding racial challenges in the USA, it will do you well to contemplate what Perry has to say in her final chapter, "Paraíso: The Bahamas and Havana."

South to America is a work all USAmericans, whatever your cultural/ethnic/racial heritage, need to read, for it is beneficial in bridging many thought gaps we have to understand how significant "the South" is to understanding our "American" soul.