When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel [Hardcover]

Veronica Chambers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

A dazzling literary debut about a young girl and her father, a magician whose tricks and illusions both ease and hinder the painful realities of their lives

WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME is the warm and tender story of Angela, a young girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. One day Angela goes to school and returns home to find her mother gone. Her magician father, Teddo, left to raise Angela alone, insists on keeping Melanie’s disappearance shrouded in mystery, but later Angela wryly observes, “My father was a magician, but my mother was the real Houdini.”

Veronica Chambers has written a compelling story about a young girl’s struggle to navigate her way through her family’s web of love, loss, and magic. As Angela tries to piece her world back together and figure out why her mother has abandoned her, she’s left to ponder the soul-shattering question: When did you stop loving me?

A universal story that is both finely-tuned and elegant, WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME captures the intricacies, pleasures, contradictions, and complexities at the heart of every family. Spare and finely told, this novel will seep beneath your skin and stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In Chambers' highly acclaimed memoir, Mama's Girl (1996), her dad took off to try to make it as a ventriloquist, leaving her to live first with her angry mother and then with him. This exquisite first novel, also set in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, reads like a memoir, only this time it's mother who leaves and is never heard from again. Eleven-year-old Angela speaks with lyrical simplicity about her grief ("I came home from school and Mommy wasn't there"); her bewildered attempts to fit into her magician dad's world; and her anger that he wants her to be his assistant, "part doll, part circus monkey." Her mother left behind only her straightening comb and a toothbrush, "pink with splayed bristles." Best of all is the unsentimental picture of the loving, messed-up single-parent dad. His rants about racism tire Angela, until a white spectator asks him why he doesn't make himself white. Chambers doesn't overdo the magician metaphors, but she makes real the disappearing acts in a world of mirrors and knives. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME is wise, funny, heartbreaking, and honest. And it is more than that. This arresting story is a tribute to the power of
young minds, a testament to the immutability of love.”
—Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

“Veronica Chambers has written a brilliant novel about a young woman’s longing for her missing mother, her tricky attachment to her magician father, and her search for her place in a world where the ground keeps shifting. The real magic lies in Chambers’s powerful illumination of family, race, fame, and ambition in a story that, by graceful sleight of hand, steals your heart.”
—Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body

“Written with keen humor and clear-eyed tenderness, WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME is the book we’ve been expecting from Veronica Chambers since she came to public notice almost ten years ago. The bittersweet saga of Angela Davis Brown joins Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster as among the great contemporary novels of a young woman’s coming-of-age.”
—Anthony Walton, author of Mississippi: An American Journey


“When Did You Stop Loving Me is alive. It breaks taboo and speaks truth about family’s power both to wound and heal. In prose that shimmers with insight and humor, Veronica Chambers exposes painful need and the love that answers it. We see behind the mirrors, but it’s still magic that these characters grow through grief to real and hard-won hope.”
—Lorene Cary, author of The Price of a Child

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385509006
• ISBN-13: 978-0385509008
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,651,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful debut, May 25, 2004

By 

Ratmammy "The Ratmammy" (Ratmammy's Town, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel (Hardcover)

WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME by Veronica Chambers

WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME is Veronica Chambers debut novel about a young black girl growing up in the 70's and early 80's whose mother decides to leave her family without a trace. It's not only a story of a girl's coming to terms with her mother's disappearance, but also a look back at an era that started with the end of the Vietnam War and the fight for Civil Rights.

Angela Davis Brown's life revolved around the love she had for her parents. Melanie is a beautiful woman who at one time had aspirations to becoming someone famous, perhaps a model or an actress. Angela's father is a professional magician, working at nightclubs and private parties. With his lack of income, her mother is the breadwinner of the family, and Melanie often berated Teddo for not bringing in enough money. When Melanie disappears, life goes on and Teddo does his best to bring up Angela on his own, trying to bring in more money and giving Melanie the sense of family she needs. He doesn't always succeed, but his heart is in the right place, teaching Melanie about life and about her black heritage.

The story is told in flashbacks, using images from the seventies to describe Teddo's convictions of a black man who is trying to survive in a white man's world. Although this story is about Angela, the story about Teddo and Melanie helps round out Angela's search for the answers she needs to explain why her mother abandoned them.

I especially enjoyed the references made to the 1970's, reminscing about the era that I grew up in. But I also enjoyed reading about these characters. I found myself laughing as Angela's father warns her about the bad influences of watching shows like the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, subservice white man shows that taught kids all sorts of bad things. He didn't want his daughter to be like that! His aspirations for her were to go to upper class white private schools and fitting in with that same crowd. Although his pride in being black was always apparent, he also had a need to be cultured, to be accepted by the upper class white population. He also taught her the gift of reading, and tried to show her that education could be acquired from simply reading a book.

I really enjoyed WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME. It was not what I had expected at all, although I cannot say at this point what I was expecting. After reading this book, I felt a satisfaction that comes from reading a good book, short and sweet, yet it packed in plenty for such a short novel. I am looking forward to more by Veronica Chambers.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Daddy, Can You Make My Mommy Reappear?, August 5, 2004

By 

Dera R Williams (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel (Hardcover)

How does an eleven year-old girl deal with the abandonment of her mother? How can the pain be lessened? It cannot but Angela Davis Brown learns to navigate the terrain of pain and mistrust by growing to trust her father, a father who sometimes is ill-equipped to care for a girl child. Teddo, a magician-- almost unheard of in the black community-- holds to his pride. A spouting black nationalist and hurt by his wife's abandonment, he is suffering from his loss and therefore makes mistakes in raising his daughter. Set in 1979, in New York, the music of the times and the racial climate gives this novel a sense of place.

Melanie had dreams and those dreams eventually drove her to become more dissatisfied with a husband who was financially unstable and a dreamer himself. When she left, she left her daughter the only thing she had of value, a pressing comb that symbolized the generations of women before her who sought to beautify themselves before they stepped out into the world. Despite his bitterness and in spite of it, Teddo still clings to the work he feels he is called to do thereby exposing Angela to the seedier side of life in nightclubs and other venues. Angela sees and hears things she should not but a precocious child, she embraces the world outside of her Brooklyn neighborhood. A wise child, she also is not afraid to question her father's racist viewpoints and no matter how much she loves him she still wonders why did her mother leave her?. The irony of the situation is not lost on her when she acknowledges that though her dad is the magician; her mother has pulled the ultimate Houdini act.

This is one that pulls at the heart strings. There is a scene where Angela recounts how though a great majority of the kids at school did not have a father in the home, everyone had a mother. Chambers is able to weave time and place and able to delve into the mind and actions of an adolescent girl. The language is at time poetic, lyrical and metaphoric.
This is a highly recommended read.

Dera Williams
APOOO BookClub

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A House of Knives and Mirrors, June 22, 2004

By 

The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers (RAWSISTAZ.com and BlackBookReviews.net) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel (Hardcover)

Set in 1970's Harlem, WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME by Veronica Chambers features Angela Davis Brown, a child abandoned by her mother, Melanie, and left to be raised by her father, Teddo, a magician. The story, told through the voice of Angie as an adult, delves into the past as Angie attempts to come to grips with her mother's abandonment. What we find is Angie's endurance, her hopefulness for her mother's return, her optimism and lack of hatred towards her mother. Through her musings we are treated to her father's agenda. Teddo is self-absorbed as he ekes a life for Angie and himself. He is consumed with race relations, the movement of the time, but only when it benefits the moment and his goals. Actually this is a story about the pain of abandonment of two people, however, it is through Angie's voice we hear her father's pain as he strives to shield the truth from Angie. Angie also bears some additional truths, some with humor and some with sadness, of the people they come into contact with such as Teddo's male friends, his female acquaintances, the clients he performs for, his bartering skills and Angie's aunt; an aunt with limited contact prior to Melanie's surrender.

Veronica Chamber's prose is excellent and her use of metaphors and similes is fluid and enjoyable to read. The imagery has the ability to take you to this era and through it as you feel for Angie and her needs as a young girl coming of age. I enjoyed listening to Angie because of her quipped remarks, replies and thoughts. The ending is heartfelt as Angie, as an adult, continues to question why her mother stopped loving her.

Reviewed by Dawn R. Reeves
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers