Mama

January 1, 1987
Mildred Peacock is broke and has no future prospects. She lives in a dilapidated house in a poverty-stricken Detroit suburb. She has a violently abusive, alcoholic husband who can't hold a job but keeps a mistress. She has five children, though she's only 27. She's black. One would think that a book about this woman's life would be dreary. The surprise of this accomplished first novel, however, is its zest and its extraordinarily positive portrayal of an impoverished family's struggle to overcome its problems. The book will be compared with Alice Walker's The Color Purple, partly because of the fine quality of its prose and partly because some of the thematic materialwhat it's like to be a poor, black woman in Americais similar. But where Walker's novel describes how things used to be, McMillan's narrative is firmly contemporary. Mama is a solid performance.

January 1, 1987
Mama, a first novel, tells of a proud black woman, Mildred Peacock, and her five children. After a violent fight, Mildred throws her drunken husband out of the house. On her own in the poor town of Point Haven, Michigan, Mildred scrimps and drinks, works and goes on welfare, struggling to raise her kids and keep her sanity. Mildred's closest bond is to her oldest daughter, Freda, and their lives parallel each other's progress from despair to hope. The book's main weakness is that the author apparently could not decide what to leave out. She also has not decided who her audience is: at times she seems to be writing to blacks, at other times to be explaining things to naive white readers. Although the story has power, it lacks focus and a clear point of view. Janet Boyarin Blundell, MLS, Brookdale Community Coll. Adjunct Faculty, Lincroft, N.J.

Copyright 1987 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.