Lady Moses: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lucinda Roy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1998

This powerful debut novel is the story of Jacinta Moses, the child of a passionate and courageous love. Her father, Simon Moses, is a black African writer; her mother, Louise, is a white British actress. Together the family carves out a vibrant life in South London filled with people drawn to Simon's powerful stories of the Africa he left behind.

But when Simon Moses died, Jacinta's mother descends into madness, leaving her daughter impoverished and alone, her only real friend an unemployed thespian, Alfred Russell-Smyth. Jacinta longs for a better life, to surround herself with beauty, to run "high and wide and deep." As she grows older, however, prejudice -- her own as well as that of others -- leads her to make adventurous but damaging choices in her life.

In her quest for happiness and security, Jacinta flees to the American South and marries a white man. But when her daughter, Lady, is born with a disability -- ruining her hopes for a picture-perfect life -- Jacinta travels with her baby and husband to Africa to search for answers in her father's homeland. Her experiences there change her forever, for it is in Africa, a land that echoes with her father's stories, that she is forced to draw on her family's great strengths and weave something brilliant out of their history of pain.

Lady Moses  is a novel about being both black and white. But it is less about issues than about passionate characters in extraordinary situations, about how one woman employs her creativity, intelligence and strength to forge an identity. With its unflinching insight and dazzling prose, Lady Moses  marks the entry of a sparkling new voice in African-American fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The heroine of Lucinda Roy's debut novel leads a life worthy of As the World Turns. Born in South London to a black African writer and a white English former actress, Jacinta Louise Buttercup Moses enjoys an idyllic childhood that is cut tragically short by her father's death. The ensuing years find Jacinta struggling against crippling poverty, escaping from the loathsome Beadycap twins downstairs, and fighting against her mother's encroaching madness. Maurice Beadycap sexually assaults Jacinta, her mother is institutionalized, she goes to live in a foster home, her best friend gets run over by a bus--all this in the first 100 pages of Lady Moses, in which the plot's potential melodrama is staved off by Roy's keen eye for detail and the strength of Jacinta's quirky, indomitable narrative voice. As an adult, Jacinta falls in love with a weaselly would-be writer named Emmanuel (who was, naturally, abused as a child) and gives birth to a one-armed daughter, sending their marriage into a tailspin from which it never quite recovers. Jacinta keeps her sense of humor, however, and so does Roy, evidenced by the tragicomic scene in which Jacinta gives birth: "When they gave me the epidural I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Nothing from the waist down. Nothing. They could have sawed me in half and I wouldn't have noticed. I told them all they were angels. I told them to come to my house so that we could have baked Alaska and steamed crab. I said they were the kindest, gentlest people in the whole world. I would always be grateful to them. I asked to kiss their feet." Only when the action shifts to Africa does the book lose this charming lightness of touch; as the symbols pile up, the villains become ever more villainous, and the hero--an African named John Turay--makes his almost unbearably heroic entrance. This is a shame, because the lyricism of the novel's closing passages is undercut by the ponderous moralizing that precedes it.

From Library Journal

A flattering prepublication blurb by Nikki Giovanni is a nice coup for a first novel. It's even better that the writing lives up to the praise. Roy (English, Virginia Tech.) has created a powerful character in Jacinta Louise Buttercup Moses. Called to share her mother's last days, Jacinta responds to her loss by narrating her story. The daughter of a biracial couple, she endures genteel and not-so-genteel poverty, the early death of her African father, her white mother's mental instability, and the disasters engendered by her own pride and drive for beauty. Her childhood is shaped by the physical poverty of South London and a loving, if wonderfully idiosyncratic, extended family. Fleeing London for the promise of America, Jacinta finds both freedom in writing and imprisonment in an unhappy marriage. Impulsively traveling again, this time to Africa, she encounters more questions before finding her own center. Unflinchingly honest, Jacinta is by turns fascinating and infuriating but always fully human. Recommended for all fiction collections.
-?Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., N.C.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 382 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006018244X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060182441
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,805,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing, May 18, 2002

By 

Friends and Readers Bookclub (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lady Moses: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Lady Moses" is an evolving tale of the coming of age of Jacinta Louise Buttercup Moses. This novel exposes the struggles of this young woman who, as a child, was circumferenced with love and fantasy. As her life begins to unravel, so does the novel's diverging story line. The strong admiration for her father was felt as one unexpected incident led to another, leaving little Jacinta alone and unadaptable to the home life around her. Jacinta grows from youth to adult with a host of complexities that lead to many imperfections in her life, Lady Moses, for one. This leaves Jacinta no choice but to come to terms with reality and take life for what it is; 'not perfect'. Lucinda Roy does a great job in depicting symbolic expressions to move the tone of the story. Such a seemingly outrageous happening near the end was needed to reiterate the theme of the book that "all it not always as it seems." This story, with its complex characters and their complex life circumstances will challenge readers to open their minds to all of life's possibilities, including the reasonably impossible.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better than Caucasia, September 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Lady Moses: A Novel (Hardcover)

Too bad this book came out at the same time as Caucasia, which stole a lot of the attention. I found Lady Moses beautifully written, smart, funny and engaging. The second half of the book falls off a bit, and the Africa stuff is a bit melodramatic. But I'd read whatever Ms. Roy decides to write next.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucinda Roy writes like an angel., March 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Lady Moses: A Novel (Hardcover)

The heroine of "Lady Moses," Jacinta Buttercup Moses, is an inspiration, Roy's prose is by turns hysterically funny and heartbreaking, and the last fifty pages of this book were so riveting I had to take the phone off the hook.