From Publishers Weekly

With a big house in an upscale Boston suburb, a doting scientist husband and two cute daughters, Grace, heroine of this penetrating novel of family affection and disaffection, is living the middle-class black woman's dream. But as she tends to her kids' wearying demands, fends off her husband's desire for a son and watches her sociology Ph.D. go to waste, she feels like "a claustrophobic in a mining shaft" and fantasizes about ditching her family. It's no idle daydream—her grandmother Rae repeatedly abandoned her children to search for whatever satisfactions life had to offer a Mississippi sharecropper's daughter, while her mother, Mattie, who sacrificed her happiness for her children's, offers an object lesson in the toll that family devotion can take. McLarin (Taming It Down) weaves the stories of three generations of mothers and daughters in astringent prose ("You couldn't be expected to live without them, but you'd better remember at all times, even with the good ones, that it was you against them," Grace muses of the wild cards that are men). Her characters chafe against the bonds of poverty, racism and feminine stereotypes, but their deeper struggle is to resolve their longing for fulfillment with ties of the heart. (July)
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From

For better or worse, each generation influences the next, and Grace does not know which generation of women in her family she resembles most. Her grandmother Royal was born into poverty in the south, one step up from slavery, and was willing to do anything to get away--including leaving her children. Mattie, her eldest daughter, would do anything for the love that her mother never gave her. She worked hard and sacrificed everything for family, even putting her children at risk financially to help her mother when she needed money. Grace, Mattie's daughter, appears to have the perfect life--a graduate degree in sociology, a loving stable husband and two young daughters--but she isn't sure that she's cut out for motherhood. As McLarin exposes how the past affects the present, she considers the problems facing African American women. With her distinctive style and unique perspective, McLarin gives her readers a thought-provoking story concerning the burdens of expectation each generation of women must bear. Patty Engelmann
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