Review: Good story but needs a bit more work
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 9, 2014
This story is well written on the whole; it intertwines the lives of two women from apparently very different backgrounds during an interesting period of American history. The two MCs are developed nicely and we are given chance to become engrossed in their separate lives by the time an incorrectly guessed phone number starts to draw them together.The background circumstances of their lives give us a picture of the times, when racial equality was still being fought for and the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were major figures; perhaps some of my disappointment is that the picture was not painted more vividly, with more depth to really bring it to life.The different strands of the story are mostly handled deftly, apart from the sudden jump back in time for the revelation about Hattie Jean and Liddie, which IMO jarred somewhat; it felt more like a sudden afterthought than a planned revelation. At times the descriptions of the people and their actions are rather clumsy, but did not mar my enjoyment of the story too much.This book would benefit from a final proofing; comma usage is poor and there are some other punctuation errors (eg "... before coming here." She said). Occasionally the tense used is incorrect and there are far too many silly little mistakes eg `no where', `made Negroes out to be murders', `I'm in jazz club'; these are mistakes that a spell and grammar check would find, never mind two authors to check each other's work.