Customer Reviews

Half a Heart

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Rosellen Brown has created very real and all-too human characters in this vivid book. Miriam and Ronnee's struggles to accept themselves, to accept one another, and to accept the past are powerful and painful. The complex issues of race, motherhood (and daughterhood), class, and honesty are addressed beautifully, with powerful prose and visceral descriptions. Brown enters the heads of both characters with equal strength and emotional intuition. Highly recommended!

I had already read a quarter of this book when the fairly bad reviews came out, but I plugged along anyway. Half way through the book, the plot really came together, and by the end (which was the part that kept me up), I was very moved. A lot of questions which are never answered are frustrating, such as why she agreed to give up the baby in the first place, but in the main, I thought it was a very touching and well written book. Maybe having a daughter of the same age, I felt all the emotions more strongly, but I am anxious to read more by this author.

Hard to believe I read the same book these reviewers are trashing. It's far more complex and sympathetic on all sides, not sentimental but challenging (maybe that's the problem)and unwilling to accept easy stereotypes. Ronnee is no "tragic mulatto" -- she may be confused but she's much too dignified for that. And her father is no big black brute. So what's going on here? Protecting the turf,to keep white writers from poaching on territory that isn't "theirs"? I guess readers will have to decide for themselves but they should read "Half a Heart" and make up their own minds.

With a whole heart, talented writer Rosellen Brown tackles a hard topic--the reunion of a long-separated mother and daughter--in the context of our national obsessions with race and love. You won't soon forget the biracial daughter, Ronnee, who veers between a prickly anger over her mother's earlier desertion and a poignant hunger for her love.

Rosellen Brown's latest novel, Half a Heart, revolves around two very well draw and complex characters: Miriam, and her half-black and semi-abandoned daughter, Veronica. There isn't much "black and white" here as far as issues and statements go....just a lot of gray - like real life.

It's also very obvious that Ms. Brown lived for many years here in Houston! She acurately and articulately describes the oppressive heat and the insulated nieghborhoods to a tee!

Ms. Brown is a more-than-competent writer and the premise of this novel is intriguing, but it disappoints on nearly every level; the storyline is tedious and the characters self-absorbed, annoying, and ultimately predictable. Most unforgivably, nearly every character or situation in the book disintegrates into stereotype. By the time I reached the chapter dealing with Ronnee's false arrest and incarceration, the circumstances felt so contrived I lost every bit of sympathy or interest. Why, after such a potentially groundbreaking premise, did Ms. Brown resort to stock scenes and cliches? The story, and her readers, deserved better than this.

This novel disappointed me deeply because it started out so good, with so much potential. A white woman gives birth to the child of a black man in 1960s Mississippi. She leaves the child to be raised by the father, but eighteen years later, still haunted by the daughter she lost, she goes looking for her. That premise has potential for melodrama, of course, but also for an interesting exploration of what it means to be a mother, as well as some complicated racial issues.

For the first hundred pages, I thought this novel would probe those issues in a sensitive and intelligent way. The two main characters Š Miriam, the mother who left her daughter behind, and Ronnee, her bi-racial child Š start out as intriguing characters. The pain of Miriam, who has a good life, but canÕt appreciate it because of the hole left by her absent child, is palpable. And Ronnee is a beautifully written character. We learn early on that she agrees to meet with her mother mainly because sheÕs hoping for some money to finance her way to college. And yet she doesnÕt come across as a greedy villain, but rather as an intelligent, ambitious and complex young woman.

But once Rosellen Brown goes into flashback to tell the story of MiriamÕs affair with RonneeÕs father, the novel goes astray. The biggest problem is that the author doesnÕt seem to know what to make of MiriamÕs lover, Eljay. She begins with a promising portrait of a charming and intelligent man, somewhat edgy and resentful because of all he has had to suffer to get where he is. But then, out of nowhere, he gets involved with a group of black separatists who seem to take over his personality. Suddenly heÕs a different, incomprehensible, man. Because we never get inside EljayÕs head, but only see him from MiriamÕs point of view, the change in him seems weird. I have the feeling Rosellen Brown was merely trying to make the point that black racism can be just as bad as white racism, but her political point gets in the way of the story. It would have been a lot more interesting to see what Afrocentrism meant to a man like Eljay. Dismissing his point of view seems like a betrayal of a potentially fascinating character.

And the novel goes downhill from there, with one clichˇ after another. Almost all the characters, black and white, are bigots, and the bigotry is so blatant and obvious, so crude, that it makes the novel seem anachronistic. God knows racism has not disappeared, but the author seems unaware that it usually takes subtler forms than it did in 1960.

Rosellen Brown is obviously a talented writer, and this novel had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the promise remained unfulfilled.

Readers of Brown's BEFORE AND AFTER, a novel that packed a tremendous emotional wallop, may be disappointed in HALF A HEART. The author starts with an intriguing premise: Miriam, an idealistic young Jewish woman, gets caught up in the civil rights struggle during the 1960's. In the course of teaching at an African-American college in Mississippi, she has a passionate love affair with a charismatic fellow teacher, the consequences of which profoundly affect the course of her adult life. While the reader is made to care about how Miriam will resolve her conflicts, the author spends far too much time describing the characters' feelings and emotions instead of letting their words and actions speak for themselves. In addition, Miriam sometimes comes across as a kvetch! Get on with your life, woman, you want to say, and stop all this analyzing and brooding. The book would have been far more effective had it been one hundred pages shorter. (For a more tightly written, suspenseful examination of how the baggage of the 60's can affect lives in the 90's, read Sue Miller's WHILE I WAS GONE.)

I gulped down this book in two days. The novel deals with important issues and the charactes are full-bodied, three-dimensional, complex.

This is a beautiful novel that gives us a complex look at the way families can divide over race. Brown never allows us to take sides, as she keeps showing us how the terms of the racial debate are flawed from the start. A brave work by a gifted storyteller.