Jump at the Sun

This saga of three generations of women in an African-American family is handled capably by the narrator. Myra Lucretia Taylor embodies the three distinct personalities through varied tone, timbre and diction, but her warm rendering of the youngest generation, through the main protagonist, especially keeps the attention and sympathies. As Taylor juggles the dialect of the characters of the 1940s' section and maneuvers through the more enunciated syllables of the modern characters, the narrative moves back and forth among the three stories without any confusion. The panic and dislocation of a career woman, who feels trapped as a mother and housewife, is presented in contrast to the worries of her grandmother, who struggled to find her place in the world against the social strictures of the time. M.R. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

May 29, 2006
With a big house in an upscale Boston suburb, a doting scientist husband and two cute daughters, Grace, heroine of this penetrating novel of family affection and disaffection, is living the middle-class black woman's dream. But as she tends to her kids' wearying demands, fends off her husband's desire for a son and watches her sociology Ph.D. go to waste, she feels like "a claustrophobic in a mining shaft" and fantasizes about ditching her family. It's no idle daydream—her grandmother Rae repeatedly abandoned her children to search for whatever satisfactions life had to offer a Mississippi sharecropper's daughter, while her mother, Mattie, who sacrificed her happiness for her children's, offers an object lesson in the toll that family devotion can take. McLarin (Taming It Down
) weaves the stories of three generations of mothers and daughters in astringent prose ("You couldn't be expected to live without them, but you'd better remember at all times, even with the good ones, that it was you against them," Grace muses of the wild cards that are men). Her characters chafe against the bonds of poverty, racism and feminine stereotypes, but their deeper struggle is to resolve their longing for fulfillment with ties of the heart.