skygiants

The main result of picking up Gloria Naylor's Mama Day while in the middle of a Tiffany Aching reread is that it made me realize right away that the title character is basically a Discworld witch. Mama Day is older than she looks, and exactly as cranky as she looks, and matriarch to a whole island; in times of great need she does things that might be magic, that probably are magic, but for the most part it's the things she does that aren't magic but are just plain practicality and common sense and doing what need to be done that matter most. (She is a master of headology.) She is wonderful. The community she dominates is wonderful too - Willow Springs is an island just off the coast of two states and therefore not officially a part of either of them, a former plantation whose inhabitants were freed and deeded the land somewhere back in a legend, the details of which nobody quite knows except that it involved Mama Day's own great-grandmother being awesomer than everyone. What this means is that Gloria Naylor gets to write a book set in the 1980's in which a black community has cheerfully and independently flourished for nearly two hundred years without worrying much at all about institutionalized oppression, a book with nearly no white people in it at all, and you can tell she is enjoying it immensely. These are the things about the book I loved.

( This is the part where I rant. Nice Guys whyyyyy! )

. . . I did not mean to rant this long, and I do think this book is worth reading, for the fantastic rich voice and for Willow Springs and for Mama Day and for Cocoa, for all the relationships among strong women. But man, I just kind of wanted to surgically remove George from the narrative.