Till You Hear from Me

March 1, 2010
There's no mistaking the audience Cleage (Seen It All and Done the Rest
) intends to reach with her grating new novel. After her work on the Obama campaign, 35-year-old Ida Dunbar expects a placement in the new administration, but it appears her hopes are dashed as a result of statements made by her outspoken father, civil rights legend Rev. Horace Dunbar. After his latest ill-considered remark, longtime family friend Miss Iona calls Ida and asks that she return home to Georgia to check on her father. Meanwhile, Wes Harper, the son of the Rev's closest confidante, returns, but for a different purpose: a Republican operative, he's been tasked with securing the Rev's voter database in order to purge the voting rolls. The author paints those associated with Ida and her father with a broad, loving, brush, while Wes and the Republicans are predictably and cartoonishly villainous. With the exception of remembrances of pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, the book is a tedious polemic, even for those inclined to agree with the narrative's political bent.

March 1, 2010
A charismatic minister's apostasy threatens his daughter's political ambitions.

Ida B. Wells Dunbar, 34, was a tireless Obama campaign worker. Now, post-Inauguration, she's languishing in D.C. awaiting a White House job offer. Has something sunk her prospects with the new administration? Could that iceberg be her father, Reverend Horace Dunbar, aka the"Rev," Atlanta's most revered and influential churchman and civil-rights leader since Dr. King? He castigated candidate Obama for distancing himself from the Rev's friend Jeremiah Wright, and his diatribe has been immortalized on YouTube. When a family friend asks Ida to intervene, she reluctantly returns to her old neighborhood (and familiar Cleage setting), Atlanta's West End, a crime-ridden slum turned gentrified African-American utopia. There, she's f'ted with mountains of down-home cuisine, provisioned by the many community gardens that have rendered the West End even more self-sustaining. Her father's loyal sidekick Ed Harper is chief gardener, but his primary function is accompanying the Rev to speaking engagements, more numerous than ever during Black History Month. The Rev's defection from Obama's camp is doubly puzzling, since he and Ed spearheaded a voter-registration campaign that mustered more than 100,000 new African-American Democrats to the polls in November. Now, encouraged by the Rev's seeming turnabout, corporate backers of the Party of No see an opportunity. If they can filch the Rev's list of new registrants, they could disqualify them all on bogus grounds in time for the midterm elections. The conservatives easily co-opt Ed's son Wes, an amoral, opportunistic WASP-wannabe who forsook the West End for Eton and the Ivy League. Can Wes, whose womanizing fits in with the rest of his stereotypical villainy, fool Ida (who pined for him in childhood) into thinking he's after her, not her father's list?

Refusing to challenge her characters, Cleage (Seen It All and Done the Rest, 2008, etc.) undermines an exciting premise.

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June 15, 2010

African American Literary Award winner Cleage follows her best-selling Seen It All and Done the Rest with this post-2008 presidential election novel. While anxiously waiting for a job offer from the White House, Ida B. Wells Dunbar heads home to Atlanta to visit her father, a civil rights icon who has uncharacteristically bashed President Obama. The plot seems straightforward, but Cleage presents a few surprises for the unsuspecting reader. Her fans will undoubtedly love her unforgettable characters--wise yet loyal Miss Iona, stubborn and perceptive Reverend Dunbar, young and passionate Lu--just as they will appreciate her exquisite insight into various African American perceptions following the unprecedented election. Unfortunately, the story is overshadowed by the themes. The action starts in the second half of the novel, and Cleage's wonderful poeticisms--"She always referred to her husband as my Charlie in a tone that was equal parts affection and ownership"--are too scarce to allow readers to get lost completely in the text.

Verdict This will appeal to lovers of contemporary African American fiction. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/10.]--Ashanti White, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2010
Along with Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, Cleages fictional Reverend Horace Dunbar is considered one of the old guard of the civil rights movement. His position in the post-Obama firmament seems secure until the Rev, as he is known, vents an unsuspected level of frustration to a reporter and the rant goes viral on YouTube. The PR fallout is damaging enough to bring his estranged daughter, Ida, home to Atlanta from Washington, where she anxiously awaits a job offer from the White House as a reward for her campaign work. Right behind her on the road to Atlanta, however, is Wes, the son of the Revs best friend, covertly sent by the RNC to steal the Revs extensive voter-registration list. While she and her father inch toward a rapprochement, Ida and a coterie of sharp, sassy women work to foil Wes plans. Within the timely, politically relevant milieu of the new administration, best-selling, incisive Cleage zestfully crafts an intuitive novel of trust and responsibility, kinship and conviction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)