McFadden doesn’t need my accolades or my fandom, but she absolutely has them. He made it possible for Sugar to see the beauty she possessed inside and out.”īernice L. The hours she spent away from him were crippling and made it, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult to hold a teacup or flick a light switch. had become another limb she never knew she needed. She had become a living, breathing part of it. At this moment, McFadden’s language for such sudden, transformative love are a perfect outtake of her craft. No one is shocked more than she, then, when she finds herself smilingly embracing life and setting aside her steely armor. Where Pearl is proper, shy, and retiring, Sugar is brash, caustic, and fiercely independent. Sugar is often presented as Pearl’s foil, in the sense of the Yin and the Yang – two parts of a whole. No excuses this time, they had taken her way past courteous and dropped her off somewhere near I don’t give a damn!” Not feigning a headache or claiming that she had to rise early for church. “It was now obvious that they had pushed Pearl to the edge, she was ordering them to leave her house, to get out. In a pivotal scene McFadden teases the reader with a glimpse of Pearl’s smoldering core: Pearl, a quiet pillar of the small Arkansas town in which she lives and a picture of true Southern decorum, possesses an innate feminine strength that drives her to fiercely protect her own. Her protagonists are fully formed and in the round, which makes their growth and transformations all the more stark. The depth of McFadden’s vision for and understanding of her characters is awesome. Sunday afternoon found him snoring in his second favorite snoozing place, after the far side of the middle pew in Bigelow’s First Baptist Church, the part that was hidden by a column.” “ He was asleep on the sofa, the television watching him, a half-empty glass of Coke sitting on the floor, the ice melting loudly within it, a half-eaten bologna sandwich on a plate next to the glass. Her descriptions of the simplest, meaningless scenes are lush and palpable. McFadden’s writing is masterfully understated and yet filled with vivid imagery. I am cowed that such a prolific and expert voice escaped my (apparently narrow) notice.
McFadden, after slugging through “jobs”, came to her “profession” in 2000 with this stunning debut and has since published eight more novels, all beloved and praised by her readers, as is evidenced by the fact that they all hold an average rating of 4 out of 5 or higher on Goodreads. I am so grateful that this Year of Reading Women project and my desire to highlight black women’s voices for the month of February led me to this brilliant author, yet I am abashed that it took this project for me to find her. McFadden’s writing and the women she has created here.
Oh the breathtaking beauty and the relentless, quiet strength of Bernice L.
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