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What Looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day: A Novel (Idlewild Book 1) Kindle Edition
After a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living with the Atlanta brothers and sisters with the best clothes and biggest dreams, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewild—her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits by cold reality. But what she imagines to be the end is, instead, a beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since Ava left, all the problems of the big city have come to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community whose ordinariness once drove her away; and she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Besides which, that one unthinkable, unmistakable thing is now happening to her: Ava Johnson is falling in love.
Acclaimed playwright, essayist, New York Times–bestselling author, and columnist Pearl Cleage has created a world rich in character, human drama, and deep, compassionate understanding, in a remarkable novel that sizzles with sensuality, hums with gritty truth, and sings and crackles with life-affirming energy.
“Very funny and charming . . . Following Cleage’s twists and turns of the human spirit, readers may find themselves on a very inspired and uplifted plane well before the last page.” —Washington Post Book World
“Cleage . . . delivers a work of intelligence and integrity. . . . [A] memorable tale.” —-Publishers Weekly, starred review
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow Paperbacks
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2009
- File size1804 KB
- What Looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day: A Novel (Idlewild Book 1)1Kindle EditionJust released$9.99$9.99
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Ada has spent the last 10 years living in Atlanta. When she discovers she's infected, she sells her hairdressing business and heads back to her childhood home of Idlewild, Michigan, to spend the summer with her recently widowed sister before moving on to San Francisco. Once there, however, she finds herself embroiled in big-city problems--drugs, violence, teen pregnancy, and an abandoned crack-addicted baby, to name just a few--in a small-town setting. Ava also meets Eddie Jefferson, a man with a past who just might change her mind about the imprudence of falling in love.
In less assured hands, such a catalog of disasters would make for maudlin, melodramatic reading indeed. But Cleage, an accomplished playwright, has a way both with characters and with language that lifts this tale above its movie-of-the-week tendencies. In Ava she has created a character who not only effortlessly carries the weight of the story but also provides entertaining commentary on African American life as she goes. Discussing the insular nature of the black community in Atlanta, she recalls, "I'd walk into a reception room and there'd be a room full of brothers, power-brokering their asses off, and I'd realize I'd seen them all naked. I'd watch them striding around, talking to each other in those phony-ass voices men use when they want to make it clear they got juice, and it was so depressing, all I'd want to do was go home and get drunk." Later, she describes the preacher's wife's hair as "pressed and hot-curled within an inch of its life.... Hardly anybody asks for that kind of hard press anymore. Sister seems to have missed the moment when we decided it was okay for the hair to move."
As the trials and tribulations pile on, the experiences of Cleage's characters prove to be universal: death, love, second chances. Ava's acerbic, smart-mouthed narrative keeps the story buoyant; by the time this endearingly imperfect heroine and her cohorts have negotiated the rocky road to a happy ending, readers will be sorry to see her go, even as they wish her well. --Alix Wilber
From Library Journal
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Lively, topical and fantasy-filled. Watch out, Terry McMillan.Cleage is on your tail." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About the Author
Pearl Cleage is the author of Mad at Miles: A Black Woman's Guide to Truth and Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. An accomplished Playwright, she teaches playwriting at Spelman College, is a cofounder of the literary magazine Catalyst and writes a column for the Atlanta Tribune. Ms. Cleage lives in Atlanta with her husband. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day...is her first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Day
By Pearl CleageHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Pearl CleageAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061710384
Chapter One
I'm sitting at the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. They were interviewing some women with what the host kept calling full-blown AIDS. As opposed to half-blown AIDS, I guess. There they were, weeping and wailing and wringing their hands, wearing their prissy little Laura Ashley dresses and telling their edited-for-TV life stories.
The audience was eating it up, but it got on my last nerve. The thing is, half these bitches are lying. More than half. They get diagnosed and all of a sudden they're Mother Teresa. I can't be positive! It's impossible! I'm practically a virgin! Bullshit. They got it just like I got it: fucking men.
That's not male bashing either. That's the truth. Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying I can't be a witness. Too many titties in one place to suit me.
I try to tune out the almost-a-virgins, but they're going on and on and now one is really sobbing and all of a sudden I get it. They're just going through the purification ritual. This is how it goes: First, you have to confess that you did nasty, disgusting sex stuff with multiple partners who may even have been of your same gender. Or you have to confess that you like to shoot illegal drugs into your veins and sometimes you use other people's works when you want to get high and you came unprepared. Then you have to describe the sin you have confessed in as much detail as you can remember. Names, dates, places, faces. Specific sexual acts. Quantity and quality of orgasms. What kind of dope you shot. What park you bought it in. All the down and dirty. Then, once your listeners have been totally freaked out by what you've told them, they get to decide how much sympathy, attention, help, money, and understanding you're entitled to based on how disgusted they are.
I'm not buying into that shit. I don't think anything I did was bad enough for me to earn this as the payback, but it gets rough out here sometimes. If you're not a little kid, or a heterosexual movie star's doomed but devoted wife, or a hemophiliac who got it from a tainted transfusion, or a straight white woman who can prove she's a virgin with a dirty dentist, you're not eligible for any no-strings sympathy.
The truth is, people are usually relieved. It always makes them feel better when they know the specifics of your story. You can see their faces brighten up when your path is one they haven't traveled. That's why people keep asking me if I know who I got it from. Like all they'd have to do to ensure their safety is cross this specific guy's name off their list of acceptable sexual partners the same way you do when somebody starts smoking crack: no future here. But I always tell them the truth: I have no idea. That's when they frown and give me one last chance to redeem myself. If I don't know who, do I at least know how many?
By that time I can't decide if I'm supposed to be sorry about having had a lot of sex or sorry I got sick from it. And what difference does it make at this point anyway? It's like lying about how much you loved the rush of the nicotine just because now you have lung cancer.
I'm babbling. I must be higher than I thought. Good. I hate to fly. I used to dread it so much I'd have to be falling-down drunk to get on a plane. For years I started every vacation with a hangover. That's actually how I started drinking vodka, trying to get up the nerve to go to Jamaica for a reggae festival. Worked like a charm, too, and worth a little headache the first day out and the first day back.
I know I drink too much, but I'm trying to cut back. When I first got diagnosed, I stayed drunk for about three months until I realized it was going to be a lot harder to drink myself to death then it might be to wait it out and see what happens. Some people live a long time with HIV. Maybe I'll be one of those, grinning like a maniac on the front of Parade magazine, talking about how I did it.
I never used to read those survivor testimonials, but now I do, for obvious reasons. The first thing they all say they had to do was learn how to calm the fuck down, which is exactly why I was drinking so much, trying to cool out. The problem was, after a while I couldn't tell if it was the vodka or the HIV making me sick, and I wanted to know the difference.
But I figure a little lightweight backsliding at thirty thousand feet doesn't really count, so by the time we boarded, I had polished off two doubles and was waiting for the flight attendant to smile that first-class-only smile and bring me two more. That's why I pay all that extra money to sit up here, so they'll bring me what I want before I have to ring the bell and ask for it.
The man sitting next to me is wearing a beautiful suit that cost him a couple of grand easy and he's spread out calculators, calendars, and legal pads across his tray table like the plane is now his personal office in the air. I think all that shit is for show. I don't believe anybody can really concentrate on business when they're hurtling through the air at six hundred miles an hour. Besides, ain't nobody that damn busy.
Continues...
Excerpted from What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Dayby Pearl Cleage Copyright © 2009 by Pearl Cleage. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC14GW
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 17, 2009)
- Publication date : March 17, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1804 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 256 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 038079487X
- Best Sellers Rank: #180,928 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,277 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #1,539 in Sisters Fiction
- #1,688 in Mothers & Children Fiction
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I will never, at least in this life, be a young black woman who is HIV positive, but this book allows me a glimpse into what that would be like.
Ava’s sister is a former social worker who quit that occupation when her husband’s unexpected death left her well enough off that she no longer had to work for a while. But Joyce, the sister, has no problem with working; she is driven to try to make a difference. She is just looking for the best way to use her good fortune to benefit others. People in Idlewild know that when there is a problem they can call on her and she will be there doing whatever she can to help.
On the day Ava is due to arrive in Idlewild, Joyce has been called upon to take a younger woman to the hospital to have her baby. Since she can’t meet Ava at the airport she sends an old family friend, Eddie Jefferson, to pick her up instead.
Ava quickly discovers that Idlewild has become a place befitting the ‘wild’ part of its name. All the big city problems she thought she left behind in Atlanta have come to her small town – things like cocaine addiction, out-of-wedlock childbirth, and AIDS – without bringing anything fun to relieve the boredom with them. She hasn’t even made it home before she encounters a case of domestic violence in the parking lot of a liquor store.
But there are some nice things too. Like Joyce. And Eddie Jefferson. When Ava thinks she may be falling for Eddie, she wonders why this had to happen after she became HIV positive.
One of the things Joyce has been involved in recently is trying to set up a support group for young unwed mothers at her church. The group is showing some promise until the preacher’s wife starts to attack it. The preacher and his wife at this church remind me of the preachers plaguing Miss Julia in the Miss Julia series. But it turns out that this preacher is involved in much more sinister activities even than Pastor Ledbetter and Brother Vern. And his wife’s attacks on Joyce, while not physically violent (well not the ones she personally launches anyway; the same can’t be said for other people she stirs up), are truly vicious. What is she trying to prove?
You can be reading about a beautiful night sky, shared by two sisters who love each other and have complete trust; the beauty of the moment, not just the sky, the lake and the dock on which they lie.
Ava is HIV positive.
Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an ordinary Day is a book full of plot. Ava is a young black woman, a successful woman who left home in Michigan at age nineteen to make her fortune and life in Atlanta and has now returned home after discovering that she is sick. Really sick. She's been through the emotions: the denial, the anger, the lists of men who might have infected her, the self-loathing, the regret and now at last, the acceptance. Ava knows she will die. The story does not end here, however. This is simply the first chapter, so I know something more is coming. It just seems that the something is going to be pretty bad. The story will end, I know, with Ava's death. Even if the book ends before the story does, in the back of your mind is the fact that Ava is HIV positive.
The small town of Idlewild, Michigan is the town where Ava was raised by her older sister Joyce and her husband, Mitch, who died one night two years ago when he and Joyce were playing on the frozen lake by their home. Mitch slid across a spot that had been a previous ice-fishing hole and went through. It took nearly a year before Joyce was able to move forward again feeling as though the insurance money was "blood money." Joyce is well enough now and by her nature is more than ready to take on the task of healing Ava. It is Ava's attempt to spend the summer with Joyce and then move to San Francisco to die, like a cat that chooses to die alone in the woods rather than at home with her family.
The author, Pearl Cleage, is one of today's masters because though we believe we can tell what will happen, we meet some remarkable people. Sp does Ava. Very slowly she and we are led back to the fold of trust. Then love. Then spiritualism. This book ends with jubilance, not at all as I had predicted. It is a book I've recommended dozens of times, added to classroom reading lists and given as a gift more than a dozen times.
If you need a lift; if you wish to be spiritually inspired and want a remarkable story with well defined characters, then you won't do better than Pearl Cledge's "What Looks Like Crazy on An Ordinary Day"
Top reviews from other countries
It was the best kind of holiday read, light but with a bit of grit around it to give the usual man meets woman story an edge. To explain, it's the same hamburger you usually get in this genre but the fillings are different.
The main reason I talk about the end in my review title is how abruptly it finishes. It's almost like, got bored and so instead of going through what happened I'll just sum it up in a few paragraphs and explain why it's a typical chick lit ending. I was really disappointed.
I would have rated this book four stars up until then but due to the abrupt end, I have downgraded it to three stars.