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Loading... River, Cross My Heartby Breena Clarke
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Novel is set in black Georgetown, part of Washington D.C. in the 1920s. Author grew up in D.C. and setting is quite plausible. A closeknit community helps a family cope with the death of a child and its aftermath. (  ) AnneliM | Apr 17, 2009 |  Another coming of age story - not bad, but not as memorable as many of the others I have read. (  ) readingrat | Jul 7, 2008 | OK book - but one in a million. Not worth the hype. ( ) estellen | May 7, 2008 | Although it would probably seem an insult to say that this book is "Good, for a first novel," it is nonetheless appropriate. Clarke's omniscient narration is intriguing, but unbalanced. The reader is much absorbed by Johnnie Mae's growing pains and attachment to her dead sister, but the other characters are only pseudo-developed. There are interesting splashes of color with Ina and Ella Bromsen, but the reader is left unfulfilled with the "haint" of Pearl. The novel is elegant in its portrayal of the hardships and struggles of African-Americans in Georgetown, balanced with characters who connect through plights other than just race. The end of the novel was too abrupt, but this is symptomatic of many a first novel. This is an enjoyable read, well-balanced in smiles and tears. Along the lines of James Agee's classic "A Death in the Family." ( )1  rebcamuse | Jan 11, 2008 | Johnnie Mae's sister drowns in Potomac; black families in Georgetown 10.01 (  ) aletheia21 | Feb 27, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she'll be able to get past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes, "Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces."
Bits of wisdom like this are the book's charm. Most remarkable are the church scenes, which Clarke renders almost purely in the give-and-take of voices: the booming preacher's sermon ("The people we love, we only borrowing them"), and the congregation's "Praise Jesus, Amen" exclamations. The author based her novel on stories passed down in Georgetown--tales of that area's first black churches, founded when people decided they wanted their own place of worship, and implicitly their own God. In church the novel takes flight. Elsewhere River, Cross My Heart suffers from clumsy, purple prose, and a plot that moves forward in labored fits and starts. Clarke painstakingly tries to re-create this past world, but sometimes it seems her duty to history is holding her back, bogging her down in period-piece details. In the effortless church scenes, history loses its gravity and is absorbed by grace. --Emily White
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400)
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