Visiting Eden.Black Girl in Paris * Shay Youngblood Shay Youngblood is a novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. She was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1959. She has been fascinated with the written word since she first learned how to read. Her favorite reoccurring dream as a child was one in which she lived in a library. * Riverhead riv·er·head n. The source of a river. Books * $23.95 Ah, the intoxicating in·tox·i·cate v. in·tox·i·cat·ed, in·tox·i·cat·ing, in·tox·i·cates v.tr. 1. To stupefy or excite by the action of a chemical substance such as alcohol. 2. rapture of a first solo trip abroad, The exhilarating new vistas, the colorful customs, and the lip-smacking smorgasbord of awaiting vices--all far, far away from nosy nos·y or nos·ey adj. nos·i·er, nos·i·est Informal 1. Given to prying into the affairs of others; snoopy. See Synonyms at curious. 2. Prying; inquisitive. parents and friends, Shay Youngblood captures much of the crazed joy and drama of the newly minted traveler in Black Girl in Paris, the enjoyable but uneven follow-up novel to her 1997 debut, Soul Kiss. Youngblood's protagonist with a passport is named Eden, a young black woman from Alabama who comes to the City of Lights to escape her past and reinvent her future, The year is 1986, and Paris is plagued by terrorism, Amid the threat of bomb blasts, Eden dreams of meeting her literary hero James Baldwin, contemplates a writing career, and spiritually channels the ghosts of Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker, To make ends meet, she finds work as an au pair and then as an artist's model, all the while accumulating a growing list of oddball characters she calls friends. Youngblood relates Eden's odyssey as a series of poetic anecdotes and journal-like entries, weaving them together through Eden's burgeoning bisexual awareness and through Baldwin allusions by various characters, But such structural looseness proves hard to grasp, and the supporting cast rarely feels as real as its star. However, like Eden, the talented, openly gay Youngblood is "looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. a new way to be in language," and when she turns out superb chapters like "Poet's Helper"--about Eden's experience as the lover and caretaker of an elder poetess--Black Girl in Paris assuredly demonstrates the redemptive power that can come with an author's literary reinvention. Bahr also writes for The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times, Time Out, and Poets & Writers. |
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