Blackgammon.

Blackgammon by Heather Neff One World/Ballantine, October 2000, $24.00 ISBN 0-345-43611-13

Blackgammon is a game of skill and chance. In Neff's new novel, the characters play while we, the audience, watch each skillful--or clumsy--move Chloe and Michael make. Chloe is off to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a successful artist. Years later, her friend Michael follows her idol Chloe's lead and goes to England to pursue her dream of a professorship. During the years they live separately, they maintain contact and continue to remind each other of the importance of following through with their vows to become strong, successful black women and never let a man turn them away from their dreams, that they made during their early days back home. These are the rules that define their game; they are the self-same rules that cause their worlds to turn completely upside down.

Neff does a wonderful job of bringing us into the worlds of her characters in such a way that readers will easily identify with these women even though their settings may be foreign. She takes readers through the ups and downs of the two friends' lives including abusive relationships, interracial relationships, passionless marriages, loneliness and inter-marital affairs, along with the persistent racism that follows them from continent to continent. Readers will find common ground in the underlying message that being strong does not require one to go through life alone and without love.

Neff creates an enchanting and glamorous setting in which to tell the story of these two remarkable women and the friendship that binds them together. She cleverly divides the book chapter by chapter, alternating voices between Michael and Chloe, as they describe who they are to each other. Readers are able to feel Chloe's pain when she tells Michael about why she felt she needed her lover, Lucien, despite the fact that he beat her.

Neff has woven together an epic adventure, involving her audience in a journey that is real and mythical, joyful and soul-wrenching, classic and modern. Her writing style is colorful and imaginative and the story is powerful enough to leave an impression long after you've read the final word of the final chapter and put the book down to rest.

Althia Gamble is the Short Fiction Editor of Inner City Magazine in New York City and works as a freelance writer.