The Woman Next Door

December 5, 2016
South African Omotoso makes her U.S. debut with this charming, touching, occasionally radiant tale of two prickly octogenarians: two women, one black and one white, neighbors who discover after 20 years of exchanging digs and insults that they might help each other. Eighty-five-year-old Barbados-born textile designer Hortensia James occupies number 10 in the small upscale Cape Town community of Katterijn. In 1994, when Hortensia and her white husband purchased the house, she became Katterijn’s first black homeowner. Now, 20 years later, she’s a widow who excels at cutting remarks, many aimed at the widow next door, 81-year-old Marion Agostino, self-appointed community leader and number 10’s architect. Their mutual animosity is well established until a repair project leaves Hortensia with a broken leg and Marion in need of temporary housing. Seeing an opportunity to avoid home nurses (whom Hortensia detests even more than she detests Marion), Hortensia invites Marion to move in with her. These creative women then create their own kind of crotchety companionship as Hortensia meets her late husband’s daughter and the descendants of slaves that once occupied her land, while Marion confronts her failures as a mother, employer, and white woman under Apartheid. Omotoso captures the changing racial relations since the 1950s, as well as the immigrant experience through personal detail and small psychological insights into mixed emotions, the artist’s eye, and widow’s remorse. Hers is a fresh voice as adept at evoking the peace of walking up a kopje as the cruelty of South Africa’s past.

November 15, 2016
Neighborliness isn't an option for two elderly enemies living in adjacent homes in Katterijn, an upscale South African residential community. So what will happen when events push them into grudging cohabitation?They call each other Hortensia the Horrible and Marion the Vulture, and they've lived next door to each other for 20 unfriendly years, with black Hortensia James openly despising white Marion Agostino's racism. Marion, mother of four and a widow, is 81; childless, Barbadian Hortensia, whose husband is on his deathbed, is four years older. Both struggled successfully to express their outstanding creativity in the mid-20th century, when working women with their own businesses were rare. Hortensia overcame racism and parental disapproval to found a famed fabric-design company, while Marion built a successful architectural practice until her pregnancies forced her to quit. In her U.S. debut, South Africa-based Barbadian writer Omotoso does a deft job of shading in the personal and professional back stories to this pair of life-hardened battle-axes, adding a deeper layer of historical resonance in the form of a surprise claim for restitution by descendants of slaves quartered at Katterijn. Children, marriage, money, race, forgiveness, and ownership all play a part as the two old sparring partners find it useful--after an accident which leaves Hortensia bed-bound and Marion homeless--to share a house, coming to terms in the process with their own and each other's truths. Hortensia will have none of Marion's "Thelma-and-Louise bullshit" as they open up to each other and compassion emerges (mixed with impatience in Hortensia's case and shame in Marion's) for babies born and not born, opportunities lost, and the suffering of generations past. A pleasing tale of reconciliation laced with acid humor and a cheery avoidance of sentimentality.

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December 1, 2016
Hortensia James and Marion Agostino have been neighbors and enemies for more than 20 years, practically since the day Hortensia and her husband moved in next door to Marion in Katterjin, a wealthy subdivision of suburban Cape Town. Omotoso's U.S. debut is an intimate, frequently hilarious look at the lives of two extraordinary women set in postapartheid South Africa. As the chapters, alternating between the two protagonists' perspectives, unfold, readers learn the origins of the deliberate antagonism of these neighbors. Hortensia, in her early eighties, is a wildly successful textile designer drowning in a self-imposed sea of bitterness. Marion, of similar age, is a native of Cape Town who was the principal of her own architecture firm before choosing motherhood over career. When circumstances force the two women to turn to each other of necessity, their resulting awakening is deeply satisfying and realistic in its untidiness. The vivid setting and intricate descriptions transport the reader to this very specific time and place, though the crackling dialog and lively, fiercely independent protagonists are universal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2016

Winner of the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, Omotoso makes her U.S. debut with a tale of two neighbors. One black and one white and both recently widowed career women, Hortensia James and Marion Agostino could have been friends. But intense jealousy has kept them far apart--until events conspire to ease the strain between them.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016

In this elegantly written novel, Omotoso introduces readers to two accomplished, unforgettable women, Marion and Hortensia, who have been neighbors for years in Cape Town's upscale Katterijn. One is an architect and the other a designer, one white and one black, and though they were the products of differing childhood experiences, you might think that they would have found common ground. Instead, they nurture an overt enmity apparently based upon race. Now widowed, the two women face uncomfortable truths about the men they married, with each reflecting upon choices made, dreams deferred, and lost chances at connection. Forging ahead into old age, these proud, feisty women must decide whether to expend waning energy on their feud or call a truce. Omotoso's warm and witty story is more complex than a simple tale of black and white, with Katterijn a microcosm of a city and a country still grappling with the repercussions of apartheid's end. VERDICT Omotoso, one of many entrancing young writers emerging from Africa today, won the South African Literary Award in 2011 for her debut novel, Bom Boy. Like Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which also depicts the wisdom found in aging, this novel will have universal appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.