Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Past is prologue-literally-for a young African-American woman making a fresh start in Cleage's (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day...) highly readable third novel. Just out of rehab and nearly bankrupt, 34-year-old Regina Burns receives a much-needed job offer from motivational speaker Beth Davis, a former employer. At 24, Regina went to work for Beth as a speechwriter and special assistant, helping Beth bring her message of empowerment to a growing national audience. The two women were accompanied by Beth's 20-something only child, known to all as Son. Regina fell in love with Son, but agreed to hide the romance from disapproving Beth. When they were discovered, Son broke up with Regina rather than upset his mother, driving Regina back home to D.C. and into a cocaine habit. Just as she is on the verge of losing everything, word of Son's death in New York on September 11 shocks Regina into rehab. When Beth decides to donate Son's papers to his alma mater, Morehouse College, she hires Regina to coordinate the project. Upon arriving in Atlanta, Regina runs into charismatic Blue Hamilton, an ex-singer who becomes her landlord. Blue wields an odd power over a peaceful city enclave bordered by threatening neighborhoods-and over Regina as well. As she works quickly to organize Son's papers, Regina must decide what to do with growing evidence of a secret life he kept hidden from Beth. At the same time Regina fears for Blue's safety when neighborhood tensions begin to escalate. The novel takes a creative path to a predictable ending, neatly resolving several plot lines. Regina is a delightful narrator: frank, self-aware and keenly observant. Cleage stumbles with the story's brief detour into the supernatural, but this distracting misstep only slightly diminishes the story's appeal.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Regina Burns, recovering from cocaine addiction and on the verge of losing her family home, reluctantly takes a temporary assignment in Atlanta. Her job: to oversee a memorial to Son Davis, the man she would have married if she could have wrested him from the grip of an overprotective mother, Regina's former and now current employer. Can she put herself back in the powerful orbit of Beth Davis? Can she help deify the image of her former fiance, even knowing his frailties? Her aunt Abbie, bolstered by a vision she's had, assures Regina that she will more than succeed in her assignment. In fact, according to Aunt Abbie, Regina will meet her soulmate (a black man with blue eyes, whom she loved in a previous life), rescue a damsel in distress, and slay a dragon. With that tall order, Regina sets off for Atlanta and meets a blue-eyed former singer who has managed to create a utopia in a troubled urban neighborhood, a place with no crime, strong men, creative women, and blooming gardens. Cleage combines her usual strong social consciousness, delicious character development, and evocative portrayal of black neighborhoods in a novel about love across the ages and foibles of public figures. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: One World/Ballantine; 1st Edition: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 edition (August 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345456068
• ISBN-13: 978-0345456069
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #572,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Atlanta native, January 26, 2004

By A Customer

The best part of the book are all the references in it to Atlanta places and the West End. It was fun to read about all the places in and around the West End, if you grew up in the ATL. The book overall was a bit disappointing. Not what I thought it would be as I read through chapter after chapter. The ending was okay, but left you feeling a bit "flat" and did not end as I expected. This was not what I expected for a Peal C book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 21st Century Cinderella, April 27, 2004

By	Rosetta J. Boyd (Decatur, GA 30035) - See all my reviews

Fairy tales are easy to recognize. They usually begin with the phrase "once upon a time" or "in ages long ago," have a beautiful," in-need-of-rescue" heroine and a hero able to perform feats of magic while dislodging demons. Atlanta writer Pearl Cleage's latest novel Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do has none of these markers, but nevertheless, it is a fairy tale.
The first clue that the book is a fairy tale is Cleage's 30ish, single, black "in-need-of-rescue" heroine, Regina Burns. Like her counterparts in fairy tale fiction, Regina Burns has a serious problem. In her case, her problem is not caused by two evil stepsisters and an equally evil step-mother. Her problem is a bit more modern. She is a recovering cocaine addict, who blames her drug addiction on the hard-to-handle way her last love affair ended. When the novel begins, with no job or other resources, she has to find a way to repay the bank the $30,000 she borrowed while an addict against the house "where she and her mother were born" before the bank sells it.
In fairy-tale worlds, heroines have fairy godmother who, with the wave of a wand, can transform pumpkins into carriages, mice into footmen, and hand-me-down clothes into fabulous, one of a kind, Neiman-Marcus gowns. With no parents, no job, no support system-just a house that she expects to find "padlocked, with an overgrown yard and `a FOR SALE sign sticking up in the middle'- fresh from rehab, Regina needs that breed of godmother. In Aunt Abbie, Regina's father's third sister with whom Regina has had no contact since her parents' funeral, who somehow knows that Regina is in rehab and the exact day on which she will be released, Cleage creates one for her. Though Cleage gives this character no wand, she does give her extraordinary powers. Not only is Aunt Abbie able to transform Regina's house into a "generally spiffed up, freshly painted house with neatly trimmed grass," but in true god-mother style, she knows that Regina must take the job she has been offered in Atlanta so that she can meet a man there with "blue eyes" who has been looking for her across time, and release a "damsel in distress from a dragon." And, despite being nearly penniless herself (this is a modern fairy tale, after all!), knowing that Regina hates planes, she is also able to vanquish that worry as well with expensive sleeper accommodations to Atlanta on Amtrak.
In Atlanta, the fairy tale continues. Prince Charming is recast as "Blue Hamilton," a three-time married man with turquoise-blue eyes who looks like "a painting of an African warrior king," and who, in true-fairy tale fashion, not only has no problems from three marriages (wives, children) that will complicate his entering into a new relationship, but rents rooms in the house where he lives to two young, attractive single women, Aretha and Flora, who are as kind and helpful to Regina as they are uninterested in Blue as a potential mate!
And what an attractive potential mate he is! Prince Charming `s lifestyle is bland pudding compared to his. He owns not just one house, but two-- the house where he lives and a second home, a large beachfront house on an island--two cars, one of which is a limousine, is industrious, gives huge $100 tips, and is able to make the neighborhood where he lives, his kingdom, West End, one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Atlanta, so safe that men do not even whistle at attractive women who walk past them.
When Cinderella gets her prince, the story ends and she has nothing left to do but go off to do whatever poor girls who manage to wed princes do. However, true to her 21st century pedigree, once Cleage's Cinderella (Regina Burns) lands her prince, her story is not over. She mutates from a woman in search of a prince into her male counterpart in fairy tales: a heroic figure able to easily complete impossible tasks. And the task she has would castrate even the most fearless fairy-tale hero! Regina's employer, the renown public figure, Beth Davis, wants Regina to orchestrate a ceremony honoring her son, who died in the 9-11 tragedy, with a building named for him at his alma mater, Morehouse. And, she wants Regina to do this without tarnishing his image by revealing that her much-respected son had a child with a stripper (of all people!) out of wedlock. That Regina is able to publicly disclose the son's secret life with a stripper and introduce their illegitimate child at the ceremony honoring the son without alienating her employer or losing the salary that she owes to her banker is final proof that Cleage's novel is a fairy tale. Where else but in a fairy tale could an audience love a public figure who pretends to live a life worthy of emulation when all the time he has had a relationship and a child with a woman who shows her body to others for a living. Where else but in a fairy tale could such a travesty end happily? Where but in a fairy tale could Cleage end her novel with her book's heroine leaving Atlanta ( read: "riding off into the sunset") for her NY hometown and her aunt Abbie with both her prince Charming and the money she needs to free her ancestral home from her weasel banker?
When comparing Cleage to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Terri McMillan, three black writers who share her audience, we can say that Toni Morrison's novels reveal a mastery of theme; Maya Angelou's of style; Terri McMillan's of plot. Although exactly what Cleage masters in her newest novel is subject to debate, what cannot be debated is that in it she does something I never thought she'd do- reduce the perennial struggle of black women for a suitable mate and a safe home to a fairy tale.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars So-So........, July 8, 2004

By	T. Kenard (Canton, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (April GMA Selection) (Paperback)

Big Cleage fan, but this one didn't "hold me hostage" like the others. I kept waiting for something to happen, but by the end of of the book, it was pretty boring. It was almost fairy-tale-ish with the visionary aunt (fairy godmother), then everything falling so neatly into place with the whole Blue Hamilton thing. I guess I can assume that he "knocked off" anyone who didn't "act right" within the bounds of his territory. Still kinda lost @ how the whole "he's been searching for you across time" thing works, but maybe it was just me.