Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Solemn and occasionally maudlin, this first novel by the author of the acclaimed memoir The Prisoner's Wife tells a tragic, too-familiar story: a promising young African-American is mistakenly shot by the police in Brooklyn, N.Y. Nineteen-year-old Aya has been getting her life together after a brush with the law and is working hard to earn a college degree. Only the coolness of her beautiful, distant single mother, Miriam, prevents her from being truly happy. When Aya is gravely wounded, Miriam is forced to face her own past and examine her emotionally arid life. Shifting focus rather clumsily, Bandele chronicles Miriam's strict upbringing and forbidden romance with sweet Bird, an ambitious janitor. Miriam loses Bird just before Aya is born, and when Aya is taken from her, too, she resorts to violence. Though she ends up in prison, she is finally able to tentatively connect with others again, meditating on a line by Aya's favorite poet, Sonia Sanchez: "I shall become a collector of me/ And put meat on my soul." Bandele tells her story in simple language, though plaintive asides ("have you ever told me a joke, Mommy, or kissed me just because?"), and italicized laments ("Oh God, didn't I pay with Bird?") give the novel a sentimental veneer. Bandele's low-key take on a grim aspect of the urban black experience stands in refreshing contrast to more sensationalistic renditions, but Miriam's muddled final epiphany will leave readers wishing for something more.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Prisoner's Wife
Description
As a favor for a friend, a bright and talented young woman volunteered to read her poetry to a group of prisoners during a Black History Month program. It was an encounter that would alter her life forever, because it was there, in the prison, that she would meet Rashid, the man who was to become her friend, her confidant, her husband, her lover, her soul mate. At the time, Rashid was serving a sentence of twenty years to life for his part in a murder. The Prisoner's Wife is a testimony, for wives and mothers, friends and families. It's a tribute to anyone who has ever chosen, against the odds, to love.

Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
This book explains the inexplicable: how a talented young poet from a good family and privileged background could meet, fall in love with, and marry a prisoner serving 20-to-life for murder. As bandele says "I didn't fall in love with a killer. I fell in love with a man committed to the transformation of himself, of the world." They meet when she is among a group of African American activists giving readings at prisons. The prison, she says, "because of its stance against love made me take a stance for love." Her prison visits become personal visits as she and Rashid share stories of their lives and he helps her confront and overcome a history of sexual abuse. Their decision to marry, and thus have conjugal visits, seems offhand but not awry, given their deep emotional intimacy. The author has a poet's fluid skill with language and maintains a lyrical tone throughout, even in the uncertainty following denial of her husband's appeal and bandele's realization that he will be locked up for at least seven more years. For all public libraries.AJanice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.