Nedra Woods’ new novel, Easy Like Sunday Morning, takes a courageous leap of artistic faith to push the art and craft of black story-telling into previously unexplored dimensions. This fresh novel is a beautiful tale that interweaves mystery and suspense into a wonderfully complex tapestry of love, commitment, and betrayal.
Heaven Weatherly was born and raised in Spring Valley, New York to a single father whose wife died giving birth to their only child. Jackson shields his miracle child from most of life’s grim realities and does his best to teach her about what is important in life, and even makes it his business – and tradition – of cooking Heaven a big country breakfast every Sunday morning, while listening to the ole skool tune of the Commodore’s “Easy Like Sunday Morning”. How sweet. Meanwhile, life is grand and Jackson’s a wonderful father (almost to the point of being unreal…in a creepy and suspicious way…but more on that later). He coaches at his daughter’s school, and is the kind of father that most fathers envy, and the women desire. Heaven loves her father very much and views him as her best friend and close confidant. When she falls in love with the high school jock, Damon Waters, Jackson’s as elated as would be any father…whose daughter happens to be dating the next NBA hopeful. (Cha-Ching!)
Then the shit hits the fan, and life stinks. Damon’s knee is busted and his NBA prospects grow slim and dim. And, as a matter of course, the marriage foundation is shaken, and the love descends like a fuel-less plane over the dark Atlantic. To make matters worse, Damon takes his frustrations out on his wife, kicking her ass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with shots of Jack Daniels in between. Meanwhile, Heaven – like a good woman – is trying to maintain their marriage, keep it together, and fake it to Jackson – who would kill Damon if he knew that the bastard was using his little girl for Ju Jitsu practice. Damon soon takes the ass-whipping profession to the next level when he puts a smack-down on Heaven so brutal that she has a miscarriage. That does it for Heaven, and she finally finds the courage to leave Damon, file for divorce, and seek out her own destiny. In other words, welcome to the real world.
Heaven flees from the delusional house that Jackson built and heads to Atlanta
to fulfill her educational goals. And from that point on she is introduced into a life of sex, lies, bitches and niggas – within the madness of Atlanta and Miami’s seductive underworld of strip-clubs, hoes, and expensive clothes. It’s on and poppin’. Yet, in the midst of this jet-set ghetto life of freedom, money, and men, Heaven realizes that none of the vanity which has become her life means anything, and it certainly cannot replace the emptiness felt, or the love lost. Now in the fast lane of fast living, fast sex, and fast times, she must decide whether to continue on the self-destructive path, or heed the lessons learned from her father, and the love missed from Damon.
Nedra Woods’ story-telling is graceful and clever (like Robert Goolrick), her characters are well developed (with the exception of “Jay”), and the climactic moment is the best since Cecelia Robinson’s book, Memoirs of a Bitch. But it is Woods’ masterful plot and its clever structure that really speaks to the brilliance of this wonderful novel. The way she weaves together suspenseful scenarios – building on these climactic elements – was like staring into a camera as it clicked random snapshots that meticulously fit onto a complex collage. Woods Hitchcockian technique for suspense will leave you spellbound.
But, as I’ve stated before, no book is perfect, and that includes this one. The book’s cover is only clever, and the book should’ve gone to more than one editor. And her characterization of Jay is poorly constructed, perhaps because Woods had not done enough research on the issue of serial rape to think that she could write about it. Also, there seemed to be a lot of sexual tension between Heaven and her father, Jackson. I always got the feeling that she was running away from something other than her failed marriage, the rape, and so on. From the beginning, I sensed something distinctly odd between Jackson and Heaven, and I hoped that Woods would’ve been willing to explore those dynamics and go a little deeper. But, these minor flaws do not take away from the purpose and meaning of the overall story. That stated, I highly recommend this book – 5/5
Cop the book at: www.nwoods.biz
what about the kennedys 