Customer Reviews

Third Girl from the Left

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2 star:		(2)
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This novel follows the stories of three different generations of African-American women: Angie, headstrong and beautiful, flees from Tulsa to LA in the early 70s; her mother Mildred, who was always so strict with Angie but who holds onto her own surprising secrets; and Angie's daughter Tamara, who struggles financially through film school. None of them had good relationships with their own mothers. They each in their own way escape through the medium of film.

The novel was easy to read and fast-paced. Southgate has obviously done her homework, particularly about the Tulsa riot in 1921 and the 1970s blaxploitation films, but the information is weaved effortlessly into the narrative. The story is believable, the characters memorable, and the writing superb. Unlike other reviewers, I do not think she is trying to cover too much in one book and I certainly cannot understand how anyone would find this book boring or too slow. Perhaps my opinion will change after reading her first novel. If you haven't read Southgate before, start with this one.

I was deeply moved by this story centered around three generations of women, all connected by blood and their love of movies. Angela leaves home at a young age to pursue a movie career that never really happens. Her daughter Tamara also has a love for film and attends film school. Tamara films everything around her. Tamara doesn't know her family or her father. She is left confused as to why Angela never answers her questions about where she comes from or just who her father is. The only family Tamara has ever known is her mother and her lover Sheila. When Angela's mother Mildred becomes ill, she returns home with Tamara. Tamara meets her mother's family for the first time. When Mildred recalls the stories from the past Tamara catches it on film. Through her Grandmother, family secrets and tragedy are exposed.
This was a very engaging and satisfying read. The characters were well defined and I was easily able to connect with them. I highly recommend this novel. A wonderful story of family.

Reviewed by
Dawnny
Mahogany Media Review
Albany, N.Y.

I have not read The Fall of Rome yet, but I did read Third Girl From The Left, and I really enjoyed it. I loved reading about the three generations of women. I especially enjoyed reading about Angela's struggle for stardom and her relationship with Sheila and Rafe. I also enjoyed reading about Mildred's afternoon rendezvous with William. I think Martha Southgate is a gifted writer and I look forward to reading other books by this author.

After much anticipation and a long wait, Martha Southgate, author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Fall of Rome, is back with her sophomore novel, Third Girl From the Left (TGFL).

TGFL is set against the backdrop of Black Hollywood and the rich, but often forgotten, legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. Southgate takes us into the realm of the mother/daughter world as we experience life from the point of view of three generations of women: Mildred-mother/grandmother; Angela, daughter; and granddaughter, Tamara.

Mildred and Angela shared a tumultuous history, however, their love of movies and their weekly movie outings was the event that bonded them during Angela's teen years. So enamored with being in the movies, Angela runs away to Los Angeles in the 70s and finds herself at the height of the blaxplotation era. Angela-along with thousands of other girls from small town, usa-- auditions constantly for the role that will maker her a star. As the years move forward, stardom eludes her, and her greatest claim to fame is a movie starring Pam Grier-where Angela has a small speaking part in a fight scene and she is the `third girl from the left.' Tiring of the daily drudgery of auditions, limited income, dreams deferred and wanting to experience a little happiness -if just for a moment, even if that happiness includes consequences, she throws caution to the wind as she engages in unprotected sex and becomes pregnant.

Tamara is the by-product of that act, and the child who appears to be able to accomplish what her grandmother and mother could not. Estranged from her family, Angela's daughter knows very little about the life she left behind in Tulsa. However, when a call beckons Angela back to Tulsa, Tamara quickly jumps at the opportunity to join her mother and find out more about her maternal side of the family. It is Tamara-the budding film producer-who brings mother and daughter together and discovers the impact that the Tulsa race riot of 1921 had on her grandmother and her relationship with others.

Rich with history regarding the Tulsa race riot, the 70s blaxplotation era and women in film, Third Girl From the Left will evoke poignant, and powerful memories. Albeit, at times a slow read, Southgate is deliberate in producing a provocative and though provoking read that is layered with rich details about family, culture and history. It is an intimate look at African American women and the strides we have made over the years as we struggled to achieve our dreams. This is a book that I highly recommend for a book club selection, as it will definitely stimulate lively and engaging discussion.

Reviewed by Yasmin
APOOO BookClub

This book is nothing short of amazing. Martha Southgate's characters are so vivid it feels as if they are actual people. It makes you want to go interview the individuals in this book despite the fact they are fictional. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down for a minute. The book follows three generations of mothers and daughters, each one trying to find a little bit of happiness for themselves by defying the social norms of the times. Each woman has to make life changing decisions for themselves while trying to remain connected to one another. Martha Southgate has truly accomplished something truly amazing with this book.

I picked this book up in a grocery store on a bit of a whim, and was ultimately surprised and pleased to have done so. I had not encountered Southgate's earlier books, so she was unfamiliar to me. I am originally from Tulsa but have been gone for several years. A few years ago, I found out about the Tulsa race riots for the first time (notably, after high school). I felt a great amount of guilt and shame about not knowing about this major event in the state's short (i.e., mostly white/"American") history, and it reminded me of the way I felt when I first learned that a lot of kids growing up in Northern Ireland had no idea that the Irish Famine of the 1840s had occurred. We just have such a inconsistent understanding of our own past, which distorts how we view ourselves now. And this is just such a sad thing to me.

This general sense of sadness and even guilt pervaded the book for me, but this is also what made it so powerful and so real to me. The protagonist is Angela, a beautiful black woman who strives for something more than what 1970s Tulsa has to offer. Interestingly, her beauty would have entitled her to more than her peers, but it isn't enough. She is clearly a free-thinker, without ever having been taught to be. She doesn't buy into the current sexual mores, for instance, and instead follows right along with the contemporary trend towards women becoming more aware of their bodies. Yet she does this not because of the women's liberation movement, which has never really reached Oklahoma, anyway, but because that's who she really is. Her inherent "differentness" causes her to develop a hatred for boring and behind-the-times Tulsa. This self-confidence, awareness of her own beauty, and her love of film eventually lead her to L.A.

L.A. couldn't be more different from Tulsa, however. She finds herself marked as an outsider--by her accent and relative innocence of the ways of the world--and she's never able to shake this stigma. This just increases her dislike of where she came from, and she desperately tries to completely remove herself from her roots. She ultimately fails to achieve what she hoped and finds only a hesitant satisfaction with her life. It is almost as if by trying to remove all traces of Tulsa from herself, she sets herself freely floating and nevers manages to ground herself in L.A. The fact that you don't fit in one place does not necessarily mean you fit in somewhere else. Recognizing this and forgiving yourself for where you come from can bring more satisfaction, and in the end Angela faces her past and finds it not as awful as she had thought.

Despite what people say, there are many of us who are outsiders even when we are at "home". Some of us will never find a place to truly fit in, even if we explore for years. The world does not actually offer an infinite number of possibilities. This is another sad thing about our existence, but undeniably true. Being able to see this through illustrated through the experiences of a young black woman living in a historically interesting world is wonderful, and just made it so clear how fundamentally human this can be.

I loved the "Fall of Rome" and I was thrilled to find this book completely unexpectedly on my library shelf. WHAT A BOOK! It grabbed me from the first page until the very last word. I couldn't wait to turn the page to see how Ms. Southgate would turn her next phrase. The 3 women are fascinating and multi-dimensional, the men in their life, interesting in their own right and not subjugated to staying in the shadow of these powerful and beautiful women.

I can't even write much more than this. I cannot intellectualize the feelings this book brought up in me. I can only say, I LOVED IT...

I must say that her first novel "Fall of Rome" is a hard act to follow; however, Martha Southgate's sophomore effort "Third Girl from the Left" supports my first impression of her as a writer: Southgate is a gifted creator and teller of stories. I not only enjoyed this mother/daughter tale, but also the talent she displayed manipulating language and weaving in the historical social climate of each of her characters (from the tragic destruction of Greenwood, OK to the era of Blaxploitation films) Each woman's narrative was a journey to becoming her own self. How awesome that each daughter--Mildred, Angela and Tamara--had to learn about her mother's past to accept her own present. Best of all was the way Southgate brought the daughter Angela back to her mother Mildred using the granddaughter-Tamara's need to make her mark as a film director. I think "Third Girl on the Left" is one heck of a story!

Martha Southgates Third Girl from the Left, is excellently written with a beleivable plot. I thought that Southgates references and detail regarding the 1970's Blaxploitation movies was very insightful. The relationship between the three women in the story is one that strikes a chord with any woman that is fortunate enough her mother and her child in her life. It is a reminder of how complicated this life can be. I have not yet read the Fall of Rome, but plan to soon. I highly recommend this book.

Tam works as the second AC on a network show, a job most people in the industry would literally kill for. All her life she's been drawn to the moving image, and on her wall at home she's hung a still from the Alexander Mackendrick masterpiece THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. And yet as Tam comes to realize, real life can be even complicated than the movies. She's the product of many geberations of strong black female presences, most notably her mother, Angela, and Angela's mother, Mildred from Tulsa Oklahoma, where once upon a time, in the darkness of a miserable past, race riots turned upside down the whole city and to some degree have shaped our understanding of racial justice and harmony ever since then.

Martha Southgate is an author new to me, but I was drawn to reading her novel after reading Donald Bogle's book on black presence in Hollywood. This summer I had the great pleasure of speaking with the scholar Valerie Boyd about her current project, researching the experience of black women in Hollywood, and Southgate's novel seemed like the next step on my journey of exploration. Angela Edwards never became a big star, and Southgate cleverly avoids the pitfalls of setting a novel inside a real scene (basically, the "blaxploitation" craze of the 1970s) by characterizing her heroine as the "third girl from the left," a bit player in a world where Fred Williamson and Pam Grier became international stars for a brief while--till white interest and financing moved on.

Angela drifts into an affair with Sheila, a woman she meets at an employment agency, but doesn't seem able to commit fully, and never considers herself a lesbian, especially after she finds herself pregnant with Tamara. Meanwhile back in Tulsa gossips tell a straitlaced Mildred that her daughter is to be seen nude on screen in FOXY BROWN and in response, Angela is now "dead" to her family. Generations of women, held back from each other by the machinations of history and by incomplete understandings of each other. When you open a book by Martha Southgate, be prepared for a shock to your system. She is the type of author who prepares us for the ultimate in life, love, death, and reading pleasure.

Through these women's lives, we participate vicariously on nearly eighty years of racial conflict and struggle. Each of them chooses a different path, indeed a different way of looking at the world. Which one do you identify with? But most of all, we enjoy her style. Just to give one example, when Tam moves to NY from LA, she can't get used to the constricted streets. NYC seems small. "Well, not small," she recollects. "Big yet cramped, like a Great Dane in a ten-pound potato sack." Can't you just feel the city wiggle?