Lady Moses: A Novel - Hardcover

Roy, Lucinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006018244X ISBN 13: 9780060182441

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1998

Synopsis

The spirited daughter of an African writer and a British actress emerges from the shadow of poverty and her father's death to survive, until bigotry--her own as well as others'--leads her to make daring but destructive choices

About this title

Review:

The heroine of Lucinda Roy's debut novel leads a life worthy of As the World Turns. Born in South London to a black African writer and a white English former actress, Jacinta Louise Buttercup Moses enjoys an idyllic childhood that is cut tragically short by her father's death. The ensuing years find Jacinta struggling against crippling poverty, escaping from the loathsome Beadycap twins downstairs, and fighting against her mother's encroaching madness. Maurice Beadycap sexually assaults Jacinta, her mother is institutionalized, she goes to live in a foster home, her best friend gets run over by a bus--all this in the first 100 pages of Lady Moses, in which the plot's potential melodrama is staved off by Roy's keen eye for detail and the strength of Jacinta's quirky, indomitable narrative voice. As an adult, Jacinta falls in love with a weaselly would-be writer named Emmanuel (who was, naturally, abused as a child) and gives birth to a one-armed daughter, sending their marriage into a tailspin from which it never quite recovers. Jacinta keeps her sense of humor, however, and so does Roy, evidenced by the tragicomic scene in which Jacinta gives birth: "When they gave me the epidural I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Nothing from the waist down. Nothing. They could have sawed me in half and I wouldn't have noticed. I told them all they were angels. I told them to come to my house so that we could have baked Alaska and steamed crab. I said they were the kindest, gentlest people in the whole world. I would always be grateful to them. I asked to kiss their feet." Only when the action shifts to Africa does the book lose this charming lightness of touch; as the symbols pile up, the villains become ever more villainous, and the hero--an African named John Turay--makes his almost unbearably heroic entrance. This is a shame, because the lyricism of the novel's closing passages is undercut by the ponderous moralizing that precedes it.

About the Author:

Lucinda Roy is a professor of English at Virginia Tech.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 006018244X
• ISBN 13: 9780060182441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382