Goodlife Mississippi: This first novel by Mississippi native, Eileen Saint Lauren, is the story of Mary Myra Boone, a youngster who endures a lot of misfortune, carries an incredible amount of guilt, and has a lot of faith. And while the author has some pretty impressive credentials, and is identified as an award-winning photo journalist, the novel is a bit difficult to follow for a Northerner who has to struggle through the English expressions and language of the poverty-stricken South of the 1960s.
More a series of short stories than an easy transition from chapter to chapter, Goodlife, Mississippi describes everything from the love and faith of family to Sunday School teachers, the Lord’s Day and Hallelujah’s at camp meetings.
The descriptions are terrific if a bit overdone…..”the sun illuminating an oval window of broken purple glass…..the sunlight infuse its gold amid the purple’s brokenness until soft sparkles of yellow broke into vein-like colorful streams leaving the church window glowing from a brown to a gray rose…” before going into a spider, a palm leaf and an olive branch engraving hugging a set of stairs that led off to a dark corner. To me, far too much information before launching into the grief at a funeral and the church that reminded Mary Myra of the Bible stories his momma used to read.
If it’s meant to show the faith of the leading character and the author, it reaches its mark. If it’s meant to show the customs of the deep South more than half a century ago, it probably does that as well.
But it seems more like a book teaching inspiration, the need for the Bible, revelation and redemption than a good old-fashioned story about growing up in in the mixed racial poor neighborhoods of Mississippi mud of the 1960s.
By Eileen Saint Lauren
Eileen Saint Lauren Books, Chapel Hill, NC.
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