Valuable life lessons are offered without being preachy and should appeal to a wide audience.” The topics of sexual harassment, living up to family expectations, and the lives of black Americans are genuine and relevant. Her delivery of the slightly raunchy banter between three old guys is sheer fun, and her depictions of the mother-daughter exchanges are priceless.

Narrator Lisa Renée Pitts is outstanding as the story’s primary character, and she absolutely shines portraying the older relatives.

This act symbolizes so much related to the self- image of black women that it’s a radical act. When Venus’ romance with Clint crumbles, she decides to cut off her long, gorgeous locks. “Not only has the author chosen the perfect title for her charming work, she’s also created an unusual love story from diverse perspectives. “Thomas offers painful but amusing insights into the politics of beauty, black culture, and male-female relationships her first novel places her in a league with Terry MacMillan and Bebe Moore Campbell.” With suspicions of her true identity growing and a bounty hunter not far behind, Dahlia must act fast or pay a devastating price.“Empowering…Thomas refuses to let her characters slide into stereotype, and she keeps the pace fast and funny.” But when Bo arrives on the estate in shackles, Dahlia decides to risk everything to save his life.

She also knows she’ll never have this chance at freedom again.Įnsconced in the Ross mansion, Dahlia soon finds herself held captive in a different way―as the dutiful wife of a young man who has set his sights on a political future. Reinventing herself as Lily Dove, Dahlia allows Timothy to believe she’s white, with no family to speak of, and agrees to marry him. Ten years later, Dahlia meets Timothy Ross, an Englishman in need of a wife. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bo, she lives in a world between black and white, belonging to neither. When Dahlia’s father, the owner of Vesterville plantation, takes her to work in his home as a servant, she’s desperately lonely. I was six years old the day Lewis Holt came to take me away.īorn into slavery, Dahlia never knew her mother―or what happened to her. A young woman pays a devastating price for freedom in this heartrending and breathtaking novel of the nineteenth-century South.ġ850.

What passes as love by trisha r thomas