“An utterly absorbing and dazzling novel about the stories we tell to stay alive and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves.” - Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times Bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee Magazine, The Root, Popsugar, Bustle, and many more!
For other perspectives on this novel, check out the other bloggers on this tour.Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Ms.
The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. Our thanks to Anne Cater from Random Things for our copy of The Two Lives of Sara, provided so we could be part of this blog tour. It is sometimes hopeful, sometimes heartbreaking, and in many ways echoes its backdrop of the civil rights era. Sara’s story is one of the power of love, the power of loss, and most of all a desperate intention to survive. If that glue does not set, if that time is too short, the devastation might be worse than before. Like any person whose life has been shattered, repairs are held together initially by a glue that needs time to set. Catherine Adel West looks unsparingly at the lives of black people in the early 60’s in Memphis through the eyes of a broken woman who starts to find healing. In our blogging venture I have had a few books that shook me to my core: There There The Mountains Sing In the Shadow of the Banyan The Garden of Angels. I can now add The Two Lives of Sara to that list. But the story, oh this story, grabs you and grips you and does not let you go. Sara’s journey is difficult, her choices are sometimes questionable, and her future is left quite unsettled in the end. She is no princess, Memphis is no kingdom, and life can be cruel. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but it would not be much of a book if Sara’s life turned into a fairytale and she lived happily ever after. After her son Lebanon is born, they love on him and finally teach Sara how to begin to love on him herself. Vanellys, their intelligent grandson Will, even the boarders at the house challenge her to accept herself, to accept her child, to accept their love. Living in the boarding house run by “Mama Sugar” as she is often called, Sara gets pulled into a family that challenges her to dare to love. Sara did not want to be a mother, she was not ready to be a mother, but in the early 1960s her choices were limited. Sara is young, single, pregnant, a black woman in the early 1960s. Sara King has left her home in Chicago and moved to Memphis to stay with her friend’s aunt.
It’s funny how books that make the most of words can leave me speechless. I have written and erased my first sentence several times. Historical Fiction: The Two Lives of Sara, Catherine Adel West Book Review: The Two Lives of Sara, Catherine Adel West
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