Review: In the Face of the Sun

After reading and enjoying Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce last year (her debut from 2021), I fully expected to enjoy her follow-up from 2022, In the Face of the Sun. Unfortunately this ended up being a dreaded case of the "sophomore slump" for me.

This is a duel timeline historical fiction novel with some romantic elements. After an introduction set in 1990, the book opens in 1968 with Frankie Saunders finally determined to leave her no-account abusive husband. What was the final straw for Frankie? She's pregnant. Unfortunately her carefully choregraphed plan goes all to hell when Jackson comes home early from work and her escape route, her Aunt Daisy, shows up in her flashy cherry red Ford Mustang early and stoned out of her mind to boot. A bunch of Drama Llama happens, Frankie ends up not taking the bus from Chicago to Los Angeles, and instead ends up agreeing to making the trip in the Mustang with Daisy and a white boy named Tobey (apparently Daisy and his mother were friends, but this is 1968 and Frankie doesn't trust white boys as a general rule). 

The other half of this story is set in 1928 and follows a young college-dropout (for reasons) Daisy working at the newly opened, Black built and owned, Hotel Somerville, located on "Black Broadway" in downtown Los Angeles. Daisy is a chambermaid with ambitions to be a journalist working for one of the famous Black newspapers, and the hotel quickly becomes the hotspot for the city's Black elite. This means Daisy has the inside track on collecting ALL the gossip - which she's doing for a local newspaperman she went to high school with. Daisy needs the money and is hustling her pretty little butt off. Her mother fell into a deep depression after her brothers (Daisy's uncles) died in the St. Francis Dam collapse and has been catatonically lying in bed ever since. Daisy wants to get her mother into one of those posh sanatoriums, not the vile state run hospital that her father is proposing. 

My goal in reading fiction is not to "learn something," but I will admit it's a nice added bonus when I do.  I live in Southern California and had NO CLUE about the Hotel Somerville (which still stands today as part of Dunbar Village and provides affordable senior housing) so the setting, the peppering in of real life historical figures, and the glimpse into that history was really interesting. Unfortunately it's wasted on poor pacing and half-baked character development.

The story is bookended with chapters set in 1990 and it's in the first chapter we learn there was a murder in 1928. Honestly, I ended up forgetting about it because the story drags on and the murder doesn't even happen until the 80% mark. What happens before that?  Not much. 1928 Daisy playing spy gathering gossip, trying to keep her younger sister in line, and falling in love with Malcolm Barnes, an affluent Black man determined to become a premier architect. 1968 Frankie spends the entire time bickering with 1968 Daisy all while somehow not having any kind of meaningful conversation with her (Daisy and Frankie's mother haven't spoken in 40 years and Frankie LITERALLY JUST MET Daisy like two weeks prior to the start of the book). Literally they just bicker. About nothing. It's boring and exhausting.

There's no bread crumbs. No teasing little reveals of family secrets to keep the reader moving forward in the book. It's all backloaded towards the end and when the murder finally does come to light?  Everything, quite literally EVERYTHING, is told to the reader. A police officer showing up on 1928 Daisy's doorstep telling her there's been a murder. The final denouement at the end told to 1968 Daisy by a secondary character. Tell, tell, tell. I wasn't invested in any of it. 

Exacerbating the problem is Daisy's character development. Folks, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I was supposed to believe that 1928 Daisy was the same person as 1968 Daisy.  For lack of a better description, 1928 Daisy is hardworking, earnest and has a stick up her butt. Oh she'll bend some rules but in many ways she's quite proper. 1968 Daisy is a cherry red Mustang driving, smoking (cigarettes and marijuana), drinking, switchblade carrying (and not afraid to use it) mouthy woman with no filter. I'm not saying these two people can't be the same person - what I am saying is that with nothing happening for 80% of the book there's not enough bread crumbs left for me to believe these two people are the same person. When it comes to Daisy we start at A and somehow end up at Z with no explanation let alone foreshadowing along the way.

It's, of course, all right as rain in the end. Frankie escapes her abusive husband (yes he of course learns she's pregnant and goes chasing after her cross country), Daisy learns the truth and reunites with her sister...along with another secondary character. The problem is I didn't care. It's hard to care about a dead body when it simply falls from the sky at 80% and then the "suspense" is told to the reader. It's hard to care about what happens to the characters when not much happens for most of the book. This is hardly an offensive read, but it's disappointing because the concept, setting and history all made for an interesting framework. It's just what was populating that framework was rather bland.

Final Grade = C-

Mini-Reviews: Darling Girls and Wild Women

Two books that couldn't be more different, other than I liked them both and don't have a ton to say about them - so it's time for another round of mini-reviews!

First up is Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce, a dual timeline historical fiction, with romantic elements, novel set in 1925 and 2015. 1925 Chicago is flowing with bootleg liquor, mobsters, and hot jazz clubs. Honoree Dalcour is a former sharecropper's daughter from Louisiana, having been in Chicago since she was a child. Her parents are both now gone (father dead, mother basically took off) which means Honoree has been left to make her own way in the world, as a dancer. Her life's ambition, to work at the classiest black-and-tan club in town, The Dreamland Café, is about to come true - until a ghost from her past waltzes through the door at her current job. The boy she desperately loved and coughed up her virginity to. The boy from a respectable wealthy Black family. The boy who ghosted her three-years ago and she assumed was dead.

In 2015 Chicago, film student Sawyer Hayes is hoping to finally finish his overdue doctoral thesis. He discovered a hidden box in his grandmother's attic containing photographs and a film cannister he thinks contains a long-lost film by the legendary Black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. He needs to get the film restored and talk to the last living link to Micheaux, a former dancer who appears in some of his grandmother's found photographs, Honoree Dalcour. Yes, she's over 100, still alive, and living in a nursing home in Chicago. Unfortunately she's stubborn and extracting her secrets is taking precious time Sawyer doesn't have.

This was an entertaining story with a lot of good historical color and flavor. The 1925 portion of the story is more richly drawn and while the book cover is bright and vibrant, the story itself is a bit darker around the edges with the plot leaning heavily on bootlegging, mobsters and the numbers racket. It's one of those plots where something good happens, immediately followed by something bad - so it definitely kept the pages turning. The 2015 storyline was interesting because it's chock-full of family secrets waiting to be uncovered, although I felt like Sawyer's personal baggage is largely left adrift. Also, while I'm a sucker for secrets, Honoree's Big Secret was a bit of a head scratcher for me - I mean why?! What was the point exactly? I'm not sure it entirely works. That being said, I did like the story overall and will read more of Bryce.

Grade = B

Sally Hepworth writes the type of suspense that's great for folks who like suspense but don't want to wade through a bunch of violence. She also knows her way around writing tension. The kind of tension that suffocates the reader from the first page to the last. Darling Girls tells the story of Jessica, Norah and Alicia, three women who were rescued from family tragedies and raised in foster care by Miss Fairchild, who owns an idyllic farm out in the country. Things, of course, are not what they seem. The girls, now grown, are called back "home" when construction workers, tearing down the house to build a new development, uncover the skeletal remains of a small child.  The "sisters" are now called back as potential witnesses (or possibly suspects) and none of them are all that ready or willing to revisit the past.

Out of the gate, all the trigger warnings for childhood trauma and abuse (psychological and emotional).  Miss Fairchild is one of those evil adult characters whose milk and cookies image is hiding a monster underneath. It's very hard to read and unsurprisingly all that childhood trauma has manifested itself in unhealthy ways now that the girls are adults. 

Told in a dual timeline between past and present, the suspense is very slow burn (hence that suffocating feeling) and doesn't truly begin to cook until the final third, when I could not tear myself away.  There's a twist at the end that had me gasping out loud, but also took off a bit of shine. It moves this book firmly from suspense to the thriller category - meaning it leaves a door open more than a crack and I'm not convinced the person how needs to be punished (mightily!) truly will be. However, all three women do end up in a better place by the end of the story, which goes a long way in making me feel less annoyed. While I'm assigning this the same grade, The Soulmate edges this one out for me, but it sure as heck is still plenty riveting.

Final Grade = B+