Photograph by chermitove
Running from Color: a novel
Wheat with green eyes red hair and fair skin is the daughter of Mildred Grass, a black woman that can bake excellent Pecan pies.
Wheat has a sister, Olive who is the exact opposite skins and she doesn’t really like her small sister.
The story starts when Mildred takes Wheat and Olive to the town to sell their pecan pies. She makes the mistake of going to the house of miss Glo Ann where she works as a maid.
Rumors and ignorance and the fact that Glo Ann is an alcoholic led to a fight between them as the Paternity of Wheat. Glo Ann insisted that Wheat was her husbands bastard baby with Mildred and Mildred emphasized that Wheat was Paul’s daughter, her husband.
One thing led to another and Glo Ann pushed Mildred down the stairs, the fall killed Mildred leaving Olive and Wheat alone.
Olive ran like the wind and reposted what she saw to the town’s sheriff Lynch Evans, and the story of the two sisters begins.
My favorite character in the novel was the grandmother of Wheat and Olive, Deary, who is the principal generator of all the hard aches the two sisters went through in their lives. I don’t want to say more about this because I don’t want to provide any spoilers.
The characters were well thought, and their psyche was well built. The story is addictive and keeps you on your toes and always guessing what will happen next.
My favorite part of the book was the fact that the author used different English dialects. When the plot of the story is happening on Sugarlock Tennessee, the characters converse in the local English dialect, and I had a few problems getting it at first but as you read you start to be fluent.
When the plot migrates to Chicago, then proper English is used. I really liked that because it made you feel more in tune with the area and the surroundings of the story and made me connect more.
The scene where the Girls father Paul is in trouble with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) broke my heart because the author described it so realistically and made me feel ashamed that there was a time that people were treated like that just because they had a different color.
The sudden character change of Wheat towards the end of the book was something that alienated me maybe because her actions were not derived from her previous described character set. Perhaps the author presented it like this so she can offer new background information about Wheat’s ina future book. Either way, it didn’t really harm the plot and if it’s going to be a second book where Olive and Wheat are in I will sure read it.
It is a beautiful well-constructed story that will captivate your interest, and I highly recommend it.
Five out of Five stars for sure.
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