 |
- General fiction - |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Shadow Dancing |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Shadow Dancing byLouise Meriwether Random House (Ballantine Books) 297 pages, 2000 ISBN 0345425952 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart Shedding our superficial selves is the topic of Louise Meriwether’s latest novel, Shadow Dancing. The main character, Glenda Jackson, is a reporter for BlackSpeak magazine. She’s a talented writer who has yet to discover her true self. Her two closest friends, Darlene (hard-drinking, high-living, and sexually promiscuous) and Cocoa (so desperate for love that she’ll stay in an abusive, non-marital relationship) are actually extreme representations of Glenda’s own personality. It seems as though Glenda often lives vicariously through her friends, while she works hard and dates little. On assignment at a Harlem theatre, she meets director Mark Abbitt, a one-man whirlwind determined to make black theatre respectable. Mark is as dedicated to his fledging theatre and the cast/crew of the Aldridge Ensemble as he is to his four-year-old son, Junior. After the first half of the novel, I was ready to abandon this piece and give up on the four characters because of their seeming shallowness. I also felt that the author used dialogue to educate the reader on the 1960s and the history of black theatre. But as I progressed through the pages, Glenda and Mark came together in a dynamic relationship that was both powerful and gentle. They shed their triteness as they confronted their innermost longings and desires. The change was subtle, showing the extraordinary depth of Meriwether’s talent, and sneaking up on the reader. By the end of Shadow Dancing, I was amazed at how much Glenda and Mark had changed as their need and love for each other grew. Emotional growth is often extremely difficult to transfer to the page, yet Louise Meriwether does such a good job with SHADOW DANCING, I was astounded by her skill and abilities. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||