17 Feb / The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Debut author Deesha Philyaw’s 2020 National Book Award finalist in fiction gets an almost (we can just ignore those minor, clumsy production glitches) flawless performance from prolific, expert Janina Edwards. Throughout the nine consistently superb stories, Edwards adapts effortlessly between mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, careless cheaters and lonely singles.
Two linked stories prove particularly unforgettable, further enhanced by Edwards’ aural agility: in “Peach Cobbler,” a daughter bears witness to her mother’s destructive affair with the married pastor; the daughter reappears in “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands” as a steely woman in utter control of her never-committal sexuality.
Edwards grows in confidence as she ciphers the schoolteacher/artist who learns to embrace her own womanhood in “How to Make Love to a Physicist.” In “Jael,” Edwards convincingly manifests both the shocked prim grandmother and her feisty teenage granddaughter obsessed with the pastor’s younger wife.
In “When Eddie Levert Comes,” Edwards expertly channels a daughter’s frustration and longing as her once-abusive mother loses her past. In the slyly comical epistolic “Dear Sister,” Edwards smoothly voices a newly dead man’s daughter tasked by her siblings with writing to a missing fifth sister who never met their philandering father.
Raw, emotional, intimate, Edwards’ narration exquisitely embodies Philyaw’s diverse women – some abandoned, some abused, some untethered, some in control, the few finally beloved.
Review: “Media,” Booklist, February 15, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021