Potomac River Rats: River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke

Sorry, Hamagrael, I did not like the book. Love the scenes of G'town. Made me think of the times you and I walked everywhere peeking into everyone's windows. I can still see you walking and riding your bike along theses streets daily, dodging cars that seem determined to knock you down. As I wrote you already, it is disheartening to know that the great great etc etc grandparents of the rats that get into your house where there during the Coolidge administration. It's Georgetown, but is it Georgetown of 1925?

I couldn't get into the characters. As we discussed in book club Tuesday, the people in Song Yet Sung drew the readers into their lives. The author strung together multiple conflicts across the Eastern shore; Clarke's story is extremely simple. In the Maryland book, we were all concerned about what was going to happen to them next. One member even went to far as to look ahead 40 or so pages to see if a character's name was still showing up. In DC book, new characters show up randomly as the story moves along, the beautician, the visiting post-partum nurse, without them becoming important or integral.

I was recently thinking about novel structure and trying to tease out in our books what is the critical incident in the plot as opposed to things that happen to move the story along or to parallel that key action. Because, I think, that critical incident, informs the decision of why the author wrote the book in the first place. I believe Clarke would say her actionable event is Rat's drowning and what it means to Johnnie May. However, everything that ensues from the drowning is passive. Confrontations are muted if not averted: her parents never ask for details; no one of authority follows up when she breaks into the all-White swimming pool; when her stepfather takes her to Union Station to send JM back to North Carolina, Alice's stance is contained, even though Clarke describes it as breaking social norms. When JM runs away after her sister's haint in the station, the readers do not know where she went or what happened as a result of her vision.

I'm reminded of my son's friends in college tossing all the books they had to read for their required English course into the fireplace because the professor selected nothing but books from Oprah's book recommendations. I guess that is the kiss of death and seeing that highlighted on the cover of the book should have warned me. I think O wants her audience to get more sympathy for African American roots. Yes, I did learn about early black history in G'town and its draw for Southerners who wanted to be self-sufficient. I already had a sense of place and know I like it there and want to return so I did not even garner a new "must-go-to" spot from reading this book.