A Change Had to Come

August 31, 2009
Popular author Forster (A Different Kind of Blues
) charts the course of a young African-American journalist, her love life and her eye-opening trip to Africa. Leticia Langley is a lucky young woman fresh out of college: not only has she landed a job as a food columnist at Washington, D.C.’s The Journal
, she’s been quickly promoted to features reporter. Meanwhile, however, Leticia’s voluptuous “best friend,” her two-faced cousin Kenyetta Jackson, decides to make a play for Leticia’s current crush. While Leticia’s discovering Kenyetta’s betrayal, she’s also overcoming distrust of another potential love interest, Journal
colleague Max Baldwin. An assignment about the roots of obesity in African-American women takes Leticia to Nigeria and Kenya, resulting in a renewal of her career prospects and passions, as well as the novel’s best passages. Though hardly unusual to the genre, Forster puts a fanciful, prerecession gloss on Leticia’s media world that keeps it several steps removed from reality.

October 15, 2009
Leticia doesnt have it easy. She delays college to care for her ailing father, then works as a short-order cook to pay for her education. She spends all her time studying to graduate at the top of her class at Howard University, then immediately lands a job at a newspaper in Washington, D.C. Her success has left Leticia with little time to work on her social skills or her appearance. So she gets herself a hair weave and new clothes, and finally, at 31, the former dateless drudge revels in the attention of flirtatious men. The only man who seems immune is Max Baldwin, the papers top journalist. When Leticia works her way up from food columnist to news reporter, they compete for the best stories. As Leticias experience with men expands, she realizes that Max is the one man who sees her for herself and that great things may come if only she can learn to trust. An uplifting African American romance that will leave readers cheering.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)