Sweet Summer
Bebe Moore Campbell. Putnam Publishing Group, $18.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13415-9
This insightful tribute to fathers--biological and stand-in--and mothers is told in a series of reminiscences of black writer Campbell's ( Successful Women, Angry Men ) childhood, which she spent with each of her divorced parents in turn: her mother in Philadelphia and her father, a paraplegic, in rural North Carolina. Campbell's narrative skillfully weaves childhood and adult voices together, showing a healthy respect for the cadences of black English. Her focus is on her changing view of her father as she grows from childhood to adolescence; once a loving but absentee god-like figure, he comes to seem a mortal and flawed human with whom she achieves a loving and mature relationship (``the best part of my father, the jewel stuck deep inside his core, was determination''). She writes of the transition with the poignant longing of a child and the knowledge of an adult. The book also concerns coming of age black in the civil rights era: summers spent in a South where signs for ``colored'' were common and winters in Philadelphia, where Campbell's mother ``was absolutely savage about enunciation, pronunciation, speaking co-rrectly, so that they would approve.'' (June)
Details
Reviewed on: 06/01/1989
Genre: Nonfiction
Mass Market Paperbound - 323 pages - 978-0-449-14984-3
Mass Market Paperbound - 978-0-345-36695-5
Paperback - 272 pages - 978-0-425-22927-9
Paperback - 272 pages - 978-0-345-36694-8
Paperback - 255 pages - 978-0-425-17474-6
Prebound-Sewn - 978-1-4176-3223-7