Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A complex story about race, class, family and history

The Wedding: A Novel by Dorothy West

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Cbr15bingo politics, racial politics in particular On a summer day on Martha’s Vineyard some time in 1950s America, beautiful Shelby Cole is getting ready to marry the man she loves, and in the 24 hours leading up to the wedding, the reader of Dorothy West’s 1995 novel The Wedding becomes privy to the complicated class and racial politics that swirl around what should be a happy day. West, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, captures generations’ worth of “striving to succeed while black in […]

Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.

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I can’t say there’s much anything wrong with this novel at all. In fact, it’s quite good. So don’t take my 3 star rating as a knock. I give 3 stars for two reasons: one, something is as good as 3 stars allows; two, it should have been better. The latter is for books that are highly regarded or highly rated and just aren’t as good as those who would otherwise say they are. I especially like to give 3 stars to books “beloved” but […]

The Living turns out to be not so easy

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Dorothy West didn’t write that much fiction all told. But she was forever involved in publishing, editing, and other fields related to writing. In the mid-1990s she published her first new novel in a few decades The Wedding which won acclaim because it’s good, because Oprah took notice, and because it was her first novel in a few decades. This novel came out in the late 1940s and it shares an obvious connection to another novel from that time The Street by Ann Petry. They have some parallels. […]



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