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A funny thing happens to Novalee Nation on her way to Bakersfield, California. Her ne'er-do-well boyfriend, Willie Jack Pickens, abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and takes off on his own, leaving her with just 10 dollars and the clothes on her back. Not that hard luck is anything new to Novalee, who is "seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty- seven pounds overweight--and superstitious about sevens.... For most people, sevens were lucky. But not for her," Billie Letts writes. "She'd had a bad history with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred...
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On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick withice.
The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while herinexperienced
assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to anemergency C-section.
And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really deadwhen the midwife operated:
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What makes Pearl Cleage's novel so damned enjoyable? At first glance, after all, What Looks Like Crazy on an OrdinaryDay
seems pretty heavy going: HIV, suicide, sudden infant death syndrome, and drunk driving all figure prominently inthe lives of
narrator Ada Johnson and her older sister Joyce. It isn't long before crack addiction, domestic violence, andunwed motherhood
have joined the list--so, where's the pleasure? The answer lies in the sharp and funny attitudeCleage brings to her...
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What if you were a 40-year-old housepainter, horrifically abused, emotionally unavailable, and your identical twin wasa paranoid
schizophrenic who believed in public self-mutilation? You'd either be a guest on the Jerry Springer Show or Dominick Birdsey,
the antihero, narrator, and bad-juju magnet of I Know This Much Is True. Somewhere in the recessesof this hefty 912-page
tome lurks an honest, moving account of one man's search, denial, and acceptance of self. This isno easy feat considering...