Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Maybe Next Time...., August 10, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I have read all of Diane McKinney-Whetstone's books, so I am quite familiar with her work and style and consider myself a fan (see my Amazon review of Leaving Cecil Street). So much of a fan that I blindly pre-ordered her new book long before a book description was available on Amazon.com or it was offered via the Vine program. Nonetheless, after I finally read the synopsis, my interest was piqued and I eagerly cracked the cover to meet Nan, her daughter (Freeda), and Freeda's children (Neena and Tish).
Familial dysfunction is at the core of the novel commingled within the tumultuous mother/daughter relationships rooted in Freeda's battles with mental illness that causes her to wander between emotional highs and lows and in and out of her daughter's lives. Freeda leaves a hole in Neena's heart when she disappears on Neena's sixteenth birthday and is not heard from again. We meet Neena at age 36 returning to Philadelphia fresh from a failed con job that leaves her homeless and virtually penniless. The reader is promptly and continually subjected to Nan and Neena's countless flashback sequences (which were at times extremely elongated and a bit dull) to gain an understanding of what occurred between "then" to arrive at "now" some twenty years later. Sadly, as much as the author delivered with the descriptive scenes of Philadelphia, reflections of a beloved bygone era, clever infusions of music and color, and even a smattering of social and political nuggets, it failed to endear me to the characters or plot. I kept waiting for something to happen, some conflict (not just reflections on Neena and Nan's inner turmoil), but for something to "pop," some build to a climax, and it never materialized. Even secondary characters like Tish, Freeda, Alfred, etc. seemed like mere afterthoughts which failed to develop fully or resonate with the reader.
Honestly I struggled to finish this book. While I was tempted to skim or skip passages, I did not. It is a book club selection and I am obligated to provide a review for the Amazon Vine program, so I wanted to be able to discuss it intelligently in its entirety and provide a fair review. So while I can equate some passages to a trek through knee-deep mud (or a cure for insomnia), I plodded my way through the novel and after four days, I finally finished it and it felt like hard labor to do so. It is recommended to die-hard fans of the author who want to visit her latest body of work to complete their collection; however, newcomers may want to pick up previous works before reading this one as it is not representative of her greatness.
Reviewed by Phyllis
Nubian Circle Book Club
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mothers and Daughters: A Family of Women, July 4, 2008
For more than twenty years, Neena has been searching for her absent, mentally ill mother, Freeda. Freeda's last appearance is the night of her sixteenth birthday when she climbed into the window of her daughters' bedroom where they live with her mother, Nan. Nan is a stern but loving grandmother to Tish and Neena. Over the years, she takes them in when Freeda's wandering mind takes her on a journey, abandoning her young daughters to fend for selves. Yet, whenever she returns, Neena is happy and can't get past her yearnings for her mother's love that she knew as a little girl. Tish longs for stability, often frightened, afraid and prefers the security of her grandmother's care.
Nan knows this and it causes a huge divide between the two of them. She never seems to be able to love Neena, the rebellious grandchild, the way that she loves Tish, the agreeable one. Neena feels she can never do right in her grandmother's eyes. She is Freeda's girl and Nan, who never forgave herself for not being able to save Freeda from her demons, sees all that she has lost in Freeda, in Neena.
In her recently released novel, Trading Dreams At Midnight, acclaimed author Diane McKinney-Whetstone brings us a hauntingly beautiful story of mothers and daughters, love and pain. The author threads issues of mental illness, alcoholism, broken marriages, prejudice, racism, and neighborhood gentrification throughout her novel. Although at times soft, it is still a hard-hitting, bittersweet novel about a family of black women who stand tough as times get tougher.
Nan also has demons to live with. As a young, lonely, single woman, Nan is so taken by the handsome, sweet talking Albert that she resorts to less than honorable ways to trap him. A working alcoholic in bad health, Alfred is more than a handful but Nan loves him enough to stand by him. After Freeda's birth, Alfred is in and out of sobriety over the years yet they manage to stay together as a family. Freeda is a Daddy's girl and the apple of his eye. Nan thought that all of her dreams had come true. As Freeda gets older, however, Nan sees that her sweet child is less than perfect. For years, Nan refuses to face the realities of her daughter's dark side. Then as a rude awakening, Nan believes that her sins are re-visited in her child. When the marriage falls apart, so does Freeda. It becomes clear that she has mental problems but Nan's help comes too late. When Freeda gives birth to Neena and Tish, Nan sets out to save the girls, hoping that her grandchildren will elude the fate that befell their mother.
Unlike Tish, Neena cannot stop longing for her mother. She drops out of college and leaves Philadelphia for Cleveland, the last place that Freeda had been spotted. Neena finds herself forced to run scams against her married lovers in order to support her search and to live the good life. Finding herself in danger after one of her scams goes bad, she returns to Philadelphia with only the clothes on her back and plans to stay with Tish until she can get on her feet again.
Tish is now happily married and doing very well as a local television anchorwoman. There is a problem, however; Tish is in the hospital threatening a miscarriage of her fetus.
Neena is broke, scared and desperate. She cannot depend on Tish or face her grandmother who she ran away from long ago. She is frightened that she really cannot come back home.
How McKinney-Whetstone brings Tish, Nan and Neena together is rich in emotion and beauty and not to be missed.
McKinney-Whetstone's lyrical prose is her trademark. Her secondary characters are just as carefully drawn as her main characters and help carry the story. Her description of Philadelphia in the late 1990s is most familiar to this reviewer who grew up in the City of Brotherly Love.
The author writes novels that never need a sequel. They are so complete you know that all is well with the characters that you have come to love. This latest offering is no different. Her loyal readers will not be disappointed. Dianne McKinney-Whetstone pens yet another African American literary classic.
[...]
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Beautiful Narrative Voice; An Uninspired Story, July 24, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
In some respects TRADING DREAMS AT MIDNIGHT is a remarkable novel: author Diane McKinney-Whetstone has a very, very distinct tone of voice and the gift of narrative poetry. Unfortunately, in this instance one must weigh that gift against a somewhat uninspired story of good mother-bad daughter and good sister-bad sister.
The novel shifts primarily between Nan, an aging grandmother, and Neena, her wayward granddaughter--both of them obsessed in their different ways with the disappearance of Freeda, Nan's daughter and Neena's mother. The story itself begins with Freeda, always a bit unstable, and on this occasion particularly so; it then moves forward and backward in time to tell the story of her mother and her two daughters as they attempt to make peace with Freeda's dark legacy and apparent determination to vanish entirely from their lives.
Nan, the grandmother, is a strong and very believeable character; Freeda, however, seems facile. I never quite believed in her, and that sense of disbelief grew as the novel progressed, undercutting the narrative as a whole. I also found the unraveling of the plot somewhat anti-climatic. Nonetheless, I continued to read simply for the pleasure of the author's narrative tone. She has a beautiful voice. I just wish it had been more wisely applied.
--GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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