Book Club discussion

I bought this book at an airport or train station because it was on the recomended reads shelf, also because I bought the Marquez book at the same time and thought it made sense to buy a new book and an old book at the same time to achieve some sort of balance. All of which is to say, I didn't much know what to expect when I picked this one up.

And so I was pleasantly surprised. I very much enjoyed the first section of the book. Not much plot, but good characters. Classic stuff. Two girls who are very similar living in the same neighbourhood. They both love to dance;but one is naturally good at it, the other has to work at it. They are both mixed race; but for one the mom is white, for the other it's the dad. They live in the same neighbourhood, but one it's the nice side of the street, the other it's the concil housing. Both are raised by their moms but one has a mom who makes her daughter her project, the other has a parent who is too busy persuing other projects to be a proper parent. One is confident, one is shy.

As the book explored these differences, it was exploring the differences in class, setting and circumstance, that though subtle, can have a profound impact that often cannot be appreciated, or even understood at the time it is occuring.

Through these interaction, and by highlighting these differences, the book was setting the stage (puns are bad) for some further show. But instead that doesn't really happen.

Instead the middle passage comes and the two characters split up and hardly see each other again. The more dramatic (read: interesting) of the two characters disappears and the reader is left with the boring narrator who spends the next part of her life as a personal assistant to a pop music icon, but who doesn't have a lot of characteristics or moments of her own to keep things interesting.

There is a detour to Africa and some time spent there, a little bit of interpersonal drama at the end of the book. But it comes a bit too late for it to matter. Also, the stakes weren't that clear to me either.